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Durability isn't so much of a problem.

At $10 each for materials, I can buy a new one for every single day for the next 5 years and it will still only cost about a quarter of what the fancy prosthetic costs.

Depends. The price of laser sintering CNC machines is coming down quickly, as they're just CO2 lasers (depending on the metal you're fusing together). I can create objects from titanium powder, which as you can imagine is pretty durable.

EDIT: Open source laser sintering [http://makezine.com/2012/02/01/an-open-source-laser-sinterin...]

Why not - plenty of people could learn an open source tool like blender and produce another model can't they? As far as durability, I think that's fine for everyday tasks and might even make it a positive, easy to replace, customize for usage type etc.

Oh I agree! I was just thinking about the barrier to entry modifying CAD files. One thing I didn't immediately think of is if you screw up a dimension, you can just print out another to try again...I guess you could argue with the ability to keep improving it over time, the 3D version could have a better fit.