That has been my experience as well. I had a bunch of printers before the X1C, from 3 different countries, and all of them needed various amounts of tweaking and hacking to reach the print quality and ease-of-use I was expecting.

Even the Prusa MK3 (upgraded to MK3S, then MK3S+...) required a Raspberry Pi to be able to print without lugging an SD card from my PC to the printer, and a USB webcam to add print monitoring.

Now when people ask for FDM printer recommendations, I tell them that this hobby has two main paths: One path regards the printer as a tool to create things for other projects; the other path has the printer as the project itself.

An analogy I use is buying a car that's working and ready to drive vs buying a car that doesn't work and repairing it. Are you looking to drive or are you looking to fix/build a car?

Bambu printers are an easy recommendation for a printer which is a tool. The new Prusa CORE One might be a good fit as well, but it's still too early to tell what its quirks are. For printers that are projects, the Ender 3 comes to mind as a very cheap base for countless tinkering and upgrades.