"5 years ago" - you may be right but this is also very debatable.

We've used Hunyuan 3D and while better than Trellis in most cases, it was no where near the type of quality we would and have gotten from a $500 human touch. This is within the last year. And I would very much argue that 5 years ago the $500 model would still win.

Yes the tech will catch up but a clean svg and a clean glb are so vastly different from one another that it's hardly worth making the comparison.

That’s a fair point. I know a few foremen who use photogrammetry religiously for site surveys and volume tracking where 'lumpy' geometry doesn't matter. It’s a huge win for that niche. But yes, 3D has been lagging behind and I'm having a really hard time guestimating when it's good enough for high quality product models.

Precisely. Until the AI can 'one-shot' the topology and the UVs, it’s not a shortcut but rather a more power intensive way to generate technical debt.

"We've seen this with photogrammetry before" - I do not believe we have. It's progressed but even a good scan is still not close to being something you would put on a legitimate eCommerce product page.

I honestly hope you are right and that I'm full of copium. Truly. But the progression has been nowhere near as fast as code, text, image, or video generation. And as it stood 2 years ago vs now is the same conclusion - unusable slop for most use cases.