Asklemmy

3D prints are almost always worse than injection moulded plastic

Entirely depends on your use case. 99% of the time it won't matter to most people with a 3D printer.

If I'm making a Gridfinity setup for my desk, it doesn't matter if it's injection molded, it sits in my desk and doesn't come into contact with any food or liquids and isn't put under high stress. If I'm making attachments for my IKEA Skadis board, it doesn't matter if they're injection molded, nothing I'm putting on them needs highly scratch-resistant plastic or marginally heavier weight capacity. If I'm making replacement mounting for a bar on an item I own to make it more convenient to use, it doesn't need injection molding to work just as effectively as an injection molded part, it's holding a few grams of weight pulled by gravity and has no other stresses or contact with food or liquids.

Injection molding is only necessary if:

• You need a more food-safe part without layer lines
• You need a part that is absolutely as strong as it physically can be with that plastic material, even if it will only be slightly stronger than the 3D-printed part's layer bonds
• You need to mass produce an item at scale very quickly, and have the upfront demand to cover the very high cost of tooling, custom molds, (thousands of dollars per individual mold) logistics, etc.

If I wanted molds made for all the things I've printed to have them injection molded instead, I'd be in debt hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

Not a single thing I've printed would have been cheaper, truly better quality (unless I had simply picked a badly made design in the first place), or more usable if it was injection molded, and I've been printing things regularly for the past 8 years.