It's not my main function at work. We just needed some custom parts for special equipment and since I knew 3D modelling already it was easy for me to provide those skills. Which was how I ended up working on this project. In my field many ready-made parts are both very expensive and not customizable enough. So 3D printing is a natural solution. A lot of it is still prohibitively expensive for most everyday applications.

Even with the expensive modern equipment we've got at work, getting it to actually work properly is not an easy task. the engineers I work with have many issues with those printers and there are many times when the printers are out of order and have to be serviced by outside specialists (which, again, is very expensive - and these are high end machines which are not cheap to begin with).

But if eventually those issues will become less common and the printers themselves more common, then your idea might become viable. In my field we need to work with very high-fidelity and extremely high-durability materials, so that also impacts the price a lot (both due to the price of the material and the price of the machinery capable of working with those materials). For simple trinkets that would be less of an issue, but then the value of the end product would also be diminished by the quality of the materials.