That’s the argument I usually hear as well. But a lot of the fidelity of such a high precision system is basically “wasted” reproducing the kinds of analog effects that exist at the edges of the ink meets paper part of writing/illustrating with a physical implement. Plotters with pens are still a commercial niche because the need for precise clean vector graphics to be mass produced in small batches of specific content (think custom topography maps with survey and drilling markers, or mission maps for a specific regional campaign, or other commercial line art work)

It’s sort of surprising there isn’t a well established reprap of plotting given it’s simplicity. The biggest missing piece is arguably the paper feed.

And as for an inkjet… why does a reliable printer need to be that good, I’d be pretty happy with a “higher dpi” pseudo dot matrix printer using a lift retract style mechanism and a hacked up refillable ink pen. Tapping out the art one dot at a time.

It’s not a bad argument for a lot of consumer printing use cases, but the “they need too much precision” never felt compelling to me given the breadth of printer technology both past and present.

You describe a rather niche printer.

Even 20 years ago most of that plotting work had been taken over by large-format inkjets - I used to be involved with a few print shops around that time.

The "high precision" is required for the very basic use case of printing a page of black on white text that does not look horrible, and being able to reliably print a 30 page document without jamming. Making the paper feed and printing head positioning hardware to do that is 90% of the way of the expense of building a decent printer.

The actual print head maybe, but there's no reason a commercial one couldn't be used, the same way people don't make their own CPUs.

The most realistic approach is probably to build an open-source printer which can drive proprietary cartridges (which would be refillable because the printer won't complain). People could even design different cartridge holders for a few different models.

It wouldn't be easy, but 3d printers also made immense progress despite technical challenges. I first heard about them in the reprap days and now we can buy well-engineered 3d printers with fancy features like resonance compensation ("input shaping").

People who are hacking in the free time often go towards hacking on things that are fun and interesting. When 3D printing appeared, it was (still is) immensely fun and interesting; "printing your own physical objects?!".

On the other hand you have 2D printing on paper, which is nowhere near as fun and interesting, so you have less people gravitating towards hacking on 2D printing software and hardware. Granted, a few FOSS giants are obviously maintaining the stack, which is amazing.

Same with programming languages for example. You give a developer unlimited free time to learn whatever language they want, they'll probably either go for a language that was newly released and hyped (like Rust) or something obscenely old (like COBOL), probably won't spend time learning PHP or Perl which are too old to be new but too new to be old.

Sounds like work. This is just printing. I can always print at the FedEx down the street.