From what I've heard, modification is both the strong point and the weak point of the Ender 3. There are tons of community-designed modifications, many of which you can print yourself without having to but a lot of parts off the shelf, but to actually get consistent prints you need to use some of those upgrades.

My girlfriend and I bought a Prusa i3 mk3s+ together, and despite going with the kit version to save money it was really easy to get good quality prints right away. One of the big things that I think helps with this is that Prusa has an auto bed leveling feature, so our printer checks the height of a bunch of points on the bed in a 9x9 grid before each print. It can then build a mesh of the print bed and use that mesh to adjust how it prints to compensate for a bed that's not perfectly level or even not perfectly flat.