Consumer 3D Printing is dying. But still. Don’t panic. Enterprise 3D printing is reaching the period of productivity, and those of us who want to still make strides in consumer 3D printing will hit on a combination of things which makes 3D printing easy for everyone. More work needs to be done on filament detection, clog management, error handling, etc.
http://community.mis.temple.edu/mis4595sec002fall2015/2015/12/07/gartners-hype-cycle-2016
Agreed 100%
Consumer 3D printing was never alive. That was just marketing/dreaming. Not even one single printer reached that point that an “average” consumer could use it. And the printers that were close to this point are way too expensive for the market.
It was always Nerd 3D printing and never consumer 3D printing 
Sven’s assessment is on the money. In terms of market rather than press and hype there never was a consumer market nor would there ever have been. That’s one reason why Makerbot was never going make those astronomical sales predictions even had they introduced a working machine. Not having a reliable machine hastened the demise.
That Gartner curve tracks hype cycle, not usability or adaptation in the market. It’s about the media and hype around a sector.
The consumer in the case of 3D printers are the same type of people that buy other machine tools. It’s small and medium businesses, people that are maker/tinker/hobbyists. The Reprap movement was the primary driver that enabled the accessibility of the technology and provided the basis the low end machines to scale.
Agreed. I get asked to build a printer for someone just about every other week and the answer is always the same…just because you own it, doesn’t mean you can use it. It needs care and feeding, debugging/troubleshooting and understanding design principles that Joe-Bag-O-Donuts might not be willing to invest the time in. Maybe some day printing is as easy as using DVD player, but not today.
@Samer_Najia
I get the same question again and again. Or the other version “which printer should I buy”.
And I always ask “what do you wanna print?”
Then the answer is often “broken things…”
So my next question is “So you have to learn 3D modeling”
And then “seriously? OK, maybe I should wait with buying a 3D printer”
My next thought is “so you’ll never buy a 3D printer” 
@Sven_Eric_Nielsen , funny, I get exactly the same thing…
According to the 2016 wohlers report, most of the 3D printers sold during the latest years are been used in researching departments or education contests, so they are really useful but not where we expected.
We have analyzed that in the Zero Report of OPTFAIN.
Amazing, I use mine for fabrication…rockets, airplanes, parts for all kinds of stuff…