Comment by ssl-3

For USB to a computer, specifically: Lots of folks just don't care. It's not on their radar.

Historically, lots of relatively popular printers have had pretty iffy support for that -- with a USB B port that ties directly into the 5v bus inside the printer alongside the printer's own power supply and this arrangement causing weird stuff to happen.

The Creality CR-10 is afflicted in this way, for example: It seems like a no-brainer to use a USB cable to drive it with Octoprint or Klipper using a Pi or something, or use it with a nearby PC, but things can turn stupid. There's a generalized note about this in Klipper's FAQ: https://www.klipper3d.org/FAQ.html

Now, that said: I'd rather have a USB device-mode port that works properly; barring that, it'd be better to have one that can be made to work well-enough than to have none at all. I'd also like to have serial data (both at RS-232 big-boy volts and TTL), and a real Ethernet port. I want an EPO input so a person can smash a big button when things go wrong, and an EPO output so the printer can shut stuff off on its own when it decides that things have gone wrong.

My connectivity desires don't align very well with what most people want out of their 3D-printing appliance, but they're real desires just the same...and I don't expect them to be fulfilled.

Anyway, it seems that Bambu Labs printers work fine, locally, over wifi. That's apparently a built-in function that can work with things like Orcaslicer. When it simply acts as a printer on a LAN, then I don't really need USB unless I'm just being pedantic today.

And as previously-discussed, Bambu Labs printers also have a clown-based mode that does clown-based stuff.

They don't do both modes simultaneously, but meh. So what? How many brains should one lowly 3D printer have to listen to concurrently?

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Anyway, the plugin under contention here seems to use the company's clown services to manage the printer instead of directly controlling it over the LAN.

And while I certainly cherish all efforts to enforce and enhance our ability to use the hardware we own in any way that we choose, this mentality doesn't extend to use of services that are provided by others.