It seems realistic to want to prevent beginners from touching expensive machinery that they could break through incorrect use.
Based on my experience, equipment at Techshop is, on average, an order of magnitude or two cheaper and a decade or two older than what you'd see at a commercial manufacturer.
Both of these are small machines. Larger machines can easily be over 100,000.00
You want your large machines to always be working, that means you want someone who can set it up right and fast. That takes experience.
The real shame is when businesses let those people retire without bothering to adequately train a replacement.
Also 5 years to be a machinist, I don't think that is true anywhere. I don't know the German system in detail, but I live in Norway which has a similar system. You take 2 years of high school to prepare for say a machinist and then 2 years as an apprentice. That seems totally reasonable to me. That means vocational training is only 1 year longer than somebody taking 3-year high school to prepare for university study.
In Norway we have seen what has happened with the professions not being as regulated, like construction work. We have vocational training for this field but the applications to this study has fallen through the floor. Years of influx of polish construction workers have pushed the wages, benefits and status down. Initially the polish immigration was god send because we had serious shortage of construction workers. However now it turns out this was almost like peeing in your pants to keep warm. Should polish workers not stay, we are screwed. We are losing our native competency in this area and we have a lost a whole generation of native Norwegians.
More regulated professions like plumbers still see strong recruitment. They got higher wages and status. That means schools retain teachers, equipment etc. Getting rid of the guild mentality might make sense in a pure economic sense. But only in the short term IMHO. In the long run you shoot yourself in the foot, because you reduce the attractiveness of the profession. Remember the main problem in the west today isn't that people aren't able to train for these professions or that the barriers are too high. The problem is that too many chose to not get vocational training because it doesn't have high enough status. People want to be college educated.
If you kill the guild like approach, you also kill the status. If anybody can do it, without any papers, then the profession commands no respect.
One of the key reasons Germans kick the shit out of the UK in manufacturing is that being a craftsmen is highly respected in Germany, while it is not in the UK. Perhaps not an accident that this is because the medieval guild system lasted much longer in Germany than in Britain.
The guild/apprenticeship model in the 20-21st century has always felt to me like a thin veil over a seniority-based structure that places strong barriers of entry on newcomers to protect the jobs of the senior staff. Want to do that job? Sorry, you can't, kid, until you "pay your dues". Want more money? That's based on how old you are. It's pretty backward and broken for a capitalist system that should pay market rates for providing value regardless of age or guild-proven experience. These types of things irked me as a child.
How much innovation would we have in technology if you had to spend five years on a starter Internet, or were forced to just use phones from the start? What if you were only allowed to program in certain languages and weren't admitted to download a specific compiler?