SLA is just such a mess if you are wanting it for occasional use. Using it from a service you supply files to makes sense if you need the better quality finish however. Give the technology another year or two at the consumer end and it may change in particular if the resin prices come down.
Nice thing with having your own gear and FDM in particular is I decided after lunch to make that foot it was on the printer in under an hour and by the end of the day I had three done and fitted and as they are mine layer lines don't matter at all. As I mentioned earlier I could have improved the look by dropping the layer height it just would have doubled the print time.
Get out of my head, you freak!!!
No, seriously... I was just about to launch into a whole long diatribe ( and probably a little snarky too, since I just sat down with my first cuppa
) saying precisely this.
With FDM, we are already at the stage where it handily beats whittling a part out of wood (yes, even on a lathe, for the most part). It won't be long before we learn to adapt our design and engineering principles to make its inherent graininess a feature of the product, just as thousands of years of experience taught us to do with wood. At the same time, new technologies like nested multiple printheads and better drive mechanics will increase speed while driving the grain finer and finer.
We are literally at the "carving with flint knives" stage with FDM. Things can only get better.
mnem
*Currently nuking a Prius*