It's definitely something I need to look into more thoroughly that's for sure.
Not sure how you can so confidently say they can't compete when volume is key to getting the cheapest prices. The easiest way to turn a profit in 3D printing is to sell blueprints/templates not selling actual product.
Like crypto, these things are inefficient but at a certain point that inefficiency stops mattering and a breakaway occurs. None of this has any relevance to if legacy players find a use for the tech or not.
Because volume is not the key to retaining the full value of production. Every product manufactured in mass production is burdened with overhead, from myriad causes, one of which is the profit of the company owner. Almost none of this overhead is borne by independent producers that use their product, rather than sell it. If I make a solar panel to put on my roof, I do not create a taxable event. I didn't earn taxable wages or pay sales taxes to buy it. I do not create profit for a company owner. I do not service debt I undertook to purchase the printer because I paid in cash. As the end user of products I make, I retain 100% of the value of the product. Because overhead is more than half the cost of most mass produced products, this makes DIY production vastly more profitable to consumers of those products than working for taxable wages to earn money to buy a mass produced product at the overhead burdened prices they are necessarily sold at. Additionally, instead of mass produced copy cat crap that I must find a way to shoehorn into my use case, by making it myself, I attain a bespoke product that fits my use case exactly, a vastly preferable product than I could buy on the open market.
Certainly there will be opposition. During the Holodomor ~10M Ukrainian and Belarussian peasants were starved to death by Communists that stripped their gardens, store rooms, and barns of anything edible, to force them onto collective farms. Similar crimes are coming, without a doubt. Being prepared in advance of political initiatives is why it is wise to adopt these technologies now, rather than wait until they mature.
Big Ag and other producers are seeking to use these technologies, but they don't scale. Windmills are great for a remote site where running wires from the grid is too expensive. The massive wind farms with propellers ~100m wide are not cost effective. The extreme speed at the tips of the propellers requires extraordinary engineering and exotic materials, which make them very expensive. Their great height makes them difficult to erect and service. I learned in the 1970s to make a backyard windmill with a Pinto rear end and generator, with some planks for the propeller. Scale matters. Decentralization scales down, not up. Independence is distributed across populations, not concentrated in massive feedlots. This is why the laws of physics that mandate decentralization of the means of production are the cutting edge of technological advance increase productivity by distributing production where consumption occurs.
Centralization is obsolete, and that includes financially. That includes crypto. Either crypto will be decentralized and controlled by the people that use it, or it won't be disruptive to the centralized legacy financial system. BTC became centralized by the mining pools, and the transaction cost soared to ~25% in 2017. Transaction cost inflation quite supersedes the fixed number of BTC that were intended to prevent inflation. BTC has not succeeded in becoming the cure for the legacy financial system, but has instead been captured by it, and the ETF further demonstrates this. The BTC ETF may make you some money, or it might be a venue for some dirty trick that will drop the price to the dirt and leave you holding the bag. The house always wins, which is why BTC was never supposed to have a house. Now it has a house, the miners. The devil's in the details of the ETFs that come online, and transaction fees will be of key import. What good will it do you to make $20k on a put it costs $50k to exercise? That'll make the miners money. Not your keys, not your crypto. Preserve your capital.