Replying to a recurring complaint here:
@ Why tinkers haven't mass marketed:
Shit breaks.
A tinker named Gearboy is commissioned to produce a mechanical battlesuit for the army, ok. That's doable. But if the suit breaks down, or if it gets normal wear and tear, there's really only one person who understands it well enough to fix it (beyond surface damage). The tinker who made it. Kid Win mentions, when modifying the earbud with Armsmaster's lie detector, that anything he does will naturally be less elegant and the work will suffer for it. The same applies for anything in regular use with non-tinkers. The soldiers won't know how to fix up the suit. So it gets damaged: hole in the chest. Repair team checks there's no damage to internal components, patch up the hole with a metal plate welded in place like they might with a vehicle, only to find that the suit's overheating and it's walking funny. They call up the tinker, but he's elbow deep in another job. They resign themselves to having the suit deployed for no more than an hour at a time.
They start talking about how to take care of the thing. An argument erupts among squad members about whether to oil the joints or not. One group says they should take care of an expensive machine, the other side of the debate says that the last time they tampered with it stuff started to go wrong. They decide to oil it. More stuff goes wrong. The systems in the arms and legs that were oiled aren't as responsive. It feels clumsy now. They decide not to oil it any more just in case, and more stuff goes wrong. The thing's basically unusable now, and they've had it only a week, with only one major confrontation.
Gearboy gets called in to handle the fix, and he goes ballistic.
The patch-up job threw the system out of balance. The gyros are supposed to compensate, but the welding job's thrown off the center of balance! Leave it that way, and the gyros start to wear down as the suit walks over miles, the system's forced to rely on the tilt compensators, which are typically used short term for lifting/carrying objects, but overuse of those causes the thing to overheat.
If the tinker were in the driver's seat, it could be adjusted or vented, but the clueless morons who are piloting it don't have a clue. Not that he can call them morons to their faces. He does want to keep his job.
And hell, that was just the patch-up job. What the hell were they thinking, using a mineral oil? Has to be synthetic, with threads of gold for the parts closest to the vents, to maintain conductivity. No wonder the hands don't work.
The tinker knows he could write a massive user manual, explaining everything, but he can't cover every eventuality. Not every climate nor every possible scenario, or what might happen if someone is forced to improvise a solution.
So he grumbles, tells them to call the next time they want to do anything to the suit. And he secretly bemoans the fact that he sold his stuff for ignorants to use on any kind of consistent basis.
An analogy, if you will: put a desktop computer in front of someone from the Victorian age. You have two hours to teach them what they need to know. Can you really cover everything that they need to know for regular use? It's really very much the same. You just know they're going to ask for help at some point, no matter how much you try to cover in a half hour, hour-long or two-hour tutorial session. Now picture a scenario where you mass produced computers and there's a thousand Victorian-era people using the systems, and you're the only one who really understands the things, you're the only one who can fix stuff if they screw it up, the only one who can reinstall an OS or tell a locked up system from a nonresponsive keyboard.
It's very much the same for a tinker.
AKA: why more stuff isn't seen on the market.
