> They wanted to diagnose the issue remotely before issuing a refund.
They were stalling you. You are in someone’s succesfull quarterly KPI metric, as a succesfully avoided return.
> You seem convinced this is somehow my fault
That the printer is not working is 100% Bambu’s fault. That they got away with it is yours.
> As someone who wanted a “just works” solution, what I got instead was something faulty
So there is a misunderstanding here. When people describe a 3d printer as “just works” they mean that it has the sensors and firmware smarts so you don’t need to become an expert to get good quality prints out of it. With previous generations of printers when the print was crap you had to look at the process and tune a ton of parameters to get it okay. Maybe your bed wasn’t flat enough? Or hot enough? Or unevenly heated? Or you needed to tweek an extrusion parameter? Or speed it up or slow it down? Or increase the hot end temp? Or increase the cooling fan rpm?
With a modern 3d printer (like the Bambu ones, but not only them) you don’t have to become an expert. Their engineers nailed down all the parameters which can be nailed down, and the rest which they can’t they added sensors for so the printer can measure them as an in-field calibration.
With the older generation of printers if it is not printing well, oh boy, you should probably get better at tuning it. With the new generation of printers if it is not printing well then the company who made the printer failed you. If it is not printing at all, because it failed the calibration then that’s the printer telling you it is broken.
It is like… imagine that you want a nice picture of your loved ones. Buying an older type of printer was like buying oil paint and a brush. You can’t just hope it will do the picture on its own. You could get the picture you wanted but you had to acquire serious skills first. No art supply shop would accept a return of your paint and brush just because the picture you paint with it are kinda crap.
In contrast buying a new generation of 3d printer is like buying a polaroid camera. It requires way less skill than the oil paint and the brush. You point, you shoot, out comes the picture. If the picture doesn’t come out the polaroid camera is broken and you should return it.
The polaroid camera is “just works” compared to the oil paint and brush even if every second camera is broken comming out of the factory. Because it is not a statement about their defect rate, but a statement about the design philosophy.