The fully assembled vs kit thing seems to come up quite a bit, and its understandable since its a different than what customers are currently used too. I wouldn't say we are focusing more on the normal consumer than the DIY people. A better view of it would be that we are looking to get reliable consistent machines in the hands of everyone, and get them printing as soon as possible.
Don't get me wrong I know people enjoy putting kits together, I had fun putting my first TOM kit together as well. However the design philosophy behind the Replicator was such that the customer is not losing anything by not assembling it themselves. The biggest argument for this I hear is that by assembling it you have a greater understanding of your machine. This is true to a degree, however with the Replicator all aspects of the machine are completely transparent. You don't have to do a million operations to get to one level of the machine. Just by looking at the machine you will pretty much know how it functions that's how streamlined it is. One of my favorite aspects of the machine is the snap features that the gantry parts have. You can literally pop out two belts, and two cables and snap off the entire X/Y assembly in a matter of I kid you not not a couple of minutes.
The other thing people may not always realize is that a lot of infrastructure goes into putting together kits and making sure that everything is there for the customer when they are ready to assemble it. All the screws and various different parts have to be put into bags and sorted, counted and accounted for. Even then as many have seen mistakes happen and kits are missing parts. Then you have to take into consideration the support aspect of all this. How many mistakes are made during assembly that cause damage to the machines? Its more than you might think, and its simply because the customer often didn't know better.
These are just some of the main reason why with the Replicator is a fully assembled and tested machine that is sent to the customer ready to work out of the box. You can of course never please everyone but this was a decision that was thought about quite a bit and in the end I believe the right decision was taken.
As far as the contributions go, there are so many great people doing so many insanely awesome things, that its hard to reward everyone. That doesn't mean that MBI does not acknowledge these people. In fact every day on multiple occasions someone at work is pointing out something awesome that one of our users has done. Its just impossible to reward every single person and keep it fair at the same time as keeping everyone happy.
At the end of the day I hope everyone who does choose to get a Replicator enjoys using it as much as it was a pleasure designing it.
