From tinkering to a tool
During Covid, I bought a cheap Creality Ender 3 mostly because I wanted something new to tinker with. It was not exactly plug and play: the frame needed assembling, the bed needed leveling, and a good first layer seemed to depend on a dozen tiny adjustments. Learning all of that was part of the fun, and the printer quickly became reliable enough to be useful rather than just interesting.
Since then, I have used it for random engineering experiments, brackets, housings, adapters, and replacement parts around the house. The best prints are often the least impressive ones: a small piece that fixes something broken, holds two components in the right place, or turns a rough prototype into something I can actually test.
Useful beats impressive
The printer was especially useful for Broadkastr. Livestreaming setups always seemed to need one more mount, spacer, cable guide, or protective enclosure, and it was often easier to measure, model, and print the missing piece than to find one online. The Ender 3 never became the project itself; it became the tool I reached for whenever a small physical problem needed a quick answer.