Unfortunately, anything MakerBot is junk. Expensive junk. I'm sorry you got suckered into their marketing vortex.

> Modeling is kind of a pain.

Unfortunately, it's much more than "kind of". It's one of the biggest barriers into 3d printing. It's all happiness and flowers when your stuff is simple or on Thingiverse/STL/model website. But once you venture out that, modeling is very hard. Not only that, but you have to abide by 3d printing modeling standards, which are learned by trial and error.

> Filament isn't food-safe

Actually, it depends. First, you need a natural filament. ABS and PLA by themselves are safe. The additives and plasticizers aren't always. And the worst is that companies will hide behind "trade secret" when you ask them for the MSDS for all the components in their plastic mixture. Or worse yet, you get Chinese filament and fun things like lead and cadmium. Yum!

Now, say you find natural ABS, great. ABS MSDS is clear and concise. Now, your second issue with food safety now is the voids in a FDM printing technique. You have to heal the holes, somehow. This can be done a few ways. The best way is to use an acetone vapor bath and melt them together. It works, and works well. Another way is to use a food-safe epoxy and paint it to fill the voids.

But no, it is not directly print->drink from.

> It is extremely slow to print anything.

It is slow to print. However what you should be comparing it to is injection mold turn arounds. There, you would be looking at a mold change and 2 weeks absolute minimum turn around, versus a few hours. And the cost per model is really pretty cheap. A mold usually costs between $10,000-$25,000 because of the CAD time and 4/5/6 axis metal milling of said mold. I know a few companies bought a cluster of 3d printers and print out what they need, and have minutes-turn around for changing and fixing parts.

> Model prep (slicing and supports) took a surprisingly large amount of time....Supports are horrible to deal with and remove.

I use slic3r to do most of my GCode generation work, and it's usually considered one of the fastest. On models that have tons of detail, yeah, it's slow. But not that bad for most models. I think this is the case of being stuck with garbage proprietary tools with no easy way to choose the best software for the job.

Also, there's a bit of work with using the water soluble supports with a 2nd hotend. That plastic's expensive, but works well. You have have to tune the 2nd hotend appropriately (and tuning initially can be painful). Aside that, standard supports using ABS or PLA do indeed suck. Try to print without using them if you can.

> but then at the top it would get all stringy.... I had several prints getting stringy

That's a consistent sign that your hotend was getting too hot for the plastic. The correct way to do this is print at a hotter temp at the base and bottom few layers, and cool down to a 'non-stringy temp', usually found by slowly turning down the hotend until you get low/no ooze.

> having to replace the nozzle

MakerBot's Replicator 2 nozzle was known defective. Worse yet was that they sold 3 packs for $500 knowing that about after 20-30 hours of use will destroy it. They're currently defending a class action lawsuit precisely because of this issue.

And also, with my 3d printer, my nozzles are $8 each, and all metal. Mine can print PLA, ABS, HiPS, Nylon, and polycarbonate. If you had a RepRap, you can look on aliexpress and find them, and the rest of the parts to build stuff cheaply.