Price of the motors (even good ones) is nothing compared to controllers and drivers. So it seems rather silly to invent a project and invest more money just to use stuff you have.
the my A4988 stepper driver here is less than $2 per module. where as the cheapest china nema17 stepper motor i can find is more than $10 per motor, so i dont get where you get it.
3d printer with steppers - OK, because it has almost zero variable/unpredictable forces on the printing head. Same for laser cutter. cnc machine - not so OK with steppers. There are huge sudden changes in cutting forces and you always end up wanting a closed-loop servo system with encoders that actually tell you where the machine is.
thats why there is engineering. if you put stepper motor driving into unpredictable force magnitude without some form of positional feedback, then you are fooling yourself. stepper is used to move gantry fast when in non-cutting mode, easy positional handling from sw side, but if one is not take care of whats going on, then... your statement is valid.. dc motor with encoder feedback seems the right job for it, until you code for positional precision and momentum overshoot handling.