If people want to print them own, and have the time to do it, more power to them.
But it reminds me of wire rope. We use a lot of wire rope where I work, and it would be cheaper to splice our own, except that there is the cost of having someone do the splicing, whose other skills might be better used elsewhere. If all they spliced or swaged all day long it would be worth it, but there is not enough work to justify a full time rigger. So really it’s cheaper and more realistic to farm it out.
We run our own firefighting simulator, and we farm out the air cylinder refills also. We can fill 30 cylinders at a whack, but we only do it sporadically. It’s an art to fill them. Meaning a trained person. So in the end it’s more practical to farm it out, than to buy and maintain a compressor.
Our navigators elect to use printed charts for specific nav techniques in certain areas of the BC Inside Passage, and elsewhere. Last year they had a vote whether to can paper charts entirely or keep them. They voted to keep them, even as they voted to upgrade the ECS aboard.
It’s not a one or the other thing for them. They have to practice unusual caution in some very tricky places, because of their pilotage waivers, and in these tricky places parallel indexing in reference to a paper chart gives them an edge, they say.
Since they are the pros they get listened to. It will be interesting to see how similar votes go with time.