I think prusa have been resting on their laurels and fallen very far behind. Bambu sort of raised the bar with their printers and the price points they are offered at. They took much of the tinkering out of the equation that filtered most people from producing quality prints.

If you're working with more exotic or engineering materials, it can still require a bit of work to dial in. But the most common like PLA, ABS, PETG will print without issue.

I bought a Prusa MK3 as a kit years ago and it worked flawlessly. Several of the higher end printers pretty much work right out of the box.

Bambu does all that and more for less money. Hard to beat.

There is no reason to get a Prusa as a hobbyist unfortunately, unless you value open source hardware.

The Prusa XL may still be worth it if you need that sort of thing.

That's very unfortunate, as I do value open source hardware. However, I value my time more, and Pruša have become complacent and released incremental updates (most of their printers aren't even CoreXY), so Bambu turned up and are eating Pruša's lunch.

I don't think there's much inherent value in the CoreXY geometry. MK4S seems to outperform everything Bambu has both on speed and on quality (especially on overhangs and dimensional precision) despite being a bed slinger.

On the other hand, continuing the bed slinger line let Prusa provide an upgrade path for existing printers.

I have a Prusa i3 MK3S+, used it for years, a recent Prusa XL, a Bambu X1C and a Bambu A1 mini. I would pick a Bambu any day, except if you need large prints and need the XL's area/volume. Otherwise the Bambu printers are quite simply better on every possible metric.

In short:

- print quality and speed is similar (new MK4S seems to be a bit better)

- Bambu's design life is much shorter (Prusas are fully repairable with parts stocked in the online shop, and every new version release includes upgrade kits for old models)

- the amount of effort/babysitting is similar

- reliability seems higher on Prusa's side (no wonder, given that they print parts of the printer on the printers themselves on industrial scale)

Also, if this matters to you, Bambu behaviour (like patenting opensource designs they didn't invent [1] and hostile competitive intelligence [2]) seems quite problematic.

[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141

[2]: https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1706713274455081120