Oh, it was obvious, that you were a Prusa fanboy.

>I don't know what it is that makes ender owners so defensive.
That needs to defend his piece of shit $1000 printer.

>The common story with them is that right out of the box they print fine
So, they print fine out of the box.

>then the cheap parts start falling apart. Fans die,
Bull shit, my fans are still stock, and not dead after 100's of hours of printing.

>the plastic extruder frame wears and eventually breaks,
Prusa's extruder frame is also plastic, even worse, Ender's have an injection-molded extruder made of ABS.

Fucking Prusas cost $1000 and come with a shitty FDM-printed extruder made of the cheapest PETG there is.

And for that price, comes with a fake Bondtech extruder that doesn't has the 3:1 reduction.

>the bowden couplers are straight garbage and start slipping
Like any Bowden couplers, it's not couplers, it's simply that the PTFE tube that wears out with metal fittings.

>a good number of them come with the hot end assembled wrong so they leak filament out all over the heater block,
Good thing then, because it comes with an assembled hotend, while the Prusa, again, for $1000, comes with a non-assembled hotend, so if something goes wrong, it's YOUR FAULT, that you didn't assembled the hotend well...

>the beds are warped
Bull shit.

You just put a glass over it, and you can see it's not warped.

ALL Prusas come with a warped bed, that DEPENDS on the sensor to correct that warped bed, without the sensor, the machine wouldn't work.

>the print quality degrades with each of those issues and the printers require attention and fiddling to address each issue.
Prusa fanboys are fucking disgusting like this.

Let's pretend, that Prusas, all of them, out of the box, have this disgusting problem:

https://github.com/prusa3d/Prusa-Firmware/issues/602

That Prusa doesn't acknowledge that exists, and shuts down, and Prusa fanboys defend that shit like it never happened.

The Prusa is a piece of trash, that is not worth even $100.

1. It's made of PETG, because it cannot print ABS, like the Ender 3 can.
2. It's made of PETG, so it melts in enclosed build chambers, the Ender 3 is made of metal (like the X carriage plane, that is very important), and ABS parts, which don't melt under 100ºC
3. For cheapness, the Prusa comes with a no-name-brand PSU that doesn't even has a fan to cool it down, so it doesn't work in enclosures, the Ender 3, has no problem with that, the Ender 3 Pro, comes with a Mean Well power supply that is half the volume of the Prusa's, and has a fan.
4. Also, for cheapness and less printing time, they don't put a fan on the motherboard, like the Ender 3 has, that means the printer skips steps like an Anet A8 on enclosed build chambers.
5. The smooth rods on the Prusa's are of low quality, and it doesn't has quality ball-bearings, like it should, the Ender 3 comes with good quality V-slot frames, again, it costs 1/5 of the price of the Prusa.
6. Fucking zip ties holding the Y rods, how cheap they can go?
7. It comes 100% unassembled, so, they can blame you that you did something wrong.
8. For $1000, it comes with a 8bit board, and the CPU only has 8KB of RAM (the Ender 3, at least has 16KB's), and is also slower (16 MIPS, vs 20MIPS on the Ender), how cheap they can go? Not even a graphical LCD!
9. The Ender 3's frame is sturdier than the cheap Prusa's frame. People have been replacing Prusa's famous frame, since ever: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2808408
10. The Prusa's dont' have an independent Z motor controller, so they can't level the two Z motors, the Ender 3 has a cantilever design that doesn't need this.

Again, this is comparing a $177 printer, with shipping, with one that costs more than 5x more...

If you spend $1000 on a Chinese printer, you'll get way better machine that a crappy Prusa.

For less than $1000, you can get a real machine, like this:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2254103/remixes

That doesn't have f**** bed rocking back and forth.

Sticking with the Ender 3, for less than $1000, you can build an Ender 3 with Bondtech extruder, all metal Micro Swiss, Duet 3D, BL Touch, etc. and it runs circles arround the Prusa, and still costs less than half.

>again, i have no idea why owners are so defensive.

It's not me, thats being defensive, it's that Prusa's fanboys have the need to attack cheap chinese printers, that are designed to be the starting point for anyone, with printers that cost 5x more, to justify their piece of crap printers. That they pay youtubers, like Maker's Muse to shit on them, so they get more people like you in the cult.

>I'm not sure if it's them trying to defend their decision to buy a cheaper printer and therefore they're ignoring flaws or what it is
You bought an expensive printer, that has more severe flaws! ROTFLMAO!

And they still don't have a solution to the 602 problem.