I majored in English and work in educational assessment. This describes approximately half of my waking life. 
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Excellent point. This is a very familiar concept to those who sell online and depend on positive reviews to thrive. People are much more likely to post about a negative experience than a positive one.
Interestingly, that’s also the reason bipolar disorder can be easy to misdiagnose as depression. But that’s a wildly tangential topic.
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Yikes, and great tip. I’ll start keeping a spreadsheet, because I definitely get heavy use out of the saved settings function. I mostly just wish it were a bit easier to navigate, rather than just an ever-lengthening vertical list in a flyout menu. Even having different sort order options would be an improvement.
Perhaps I need a better naming system.
OH! How about the ability to rename saved custom settings? If there is a way, I have yet to figure it out. I know you can update them by changing the settings and hitting the floppy icon save button, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the name once one is created. The workaround I use is to open the setting I want to rename, hit the plus button, save it under a different name, and then delete the original saved setting. Not exactly difficult, but the lack of renaming ability just seems like a silly oversight.
Definitely aware of that, and my list is about as long as yours. Here’s a better explanation I posted further up for clarification. I’ll update my OP so as not to confuse any more people. I apologize for not being clearer in the first place.
Or, as @jbv succinctly put it: “Essentially being able to group custom settings into a custom material choice.”
There are more circumstances and materials than the GFUI can autoguess. But by careful naming they can auto-arrange alphabetically so Mohoe would be together on the list and so would Koa and Chechen each set to the different thicknesses you might be using.
I am not in that group, either. I am experiencing long-term satisfaction. I had a pre-production machine for a while in the very beginning. The lid glass separated at the back left hinge and they replaced it with a brand new Glowforge which will be 5 years ago in August. Aside from the hinge/lid separation thing, the only other thing that’s happened to mine is needing to have the black lid cable replaced, which was only in the last 6 months or so.
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And?
Awareness of personal and world circumstances is often misdiagnosed as depression. Blaming the machine for not acting as their misunderstanding thinks it should and loud outrage that there is not someone working weekends so send them a brand new machine within the hour and not some refurbished “junk” that works no better than their current machine, then taking revenge by yelling loudly how bad the machined is, probably has a diagnosis as well but the cure is much more challenging.
That is not to say there are no issues, but a fundamental design flaw that affects only them is unlikely.
As stated in the first response, you should email your ideas to support - although I suggest you make them much more succinct.
I have a hard time being succinct—as I’m sure you could tell—mostly due to fear of being ambiguous. I will do my best to pare it down before sending it their way. As Twain once said, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”
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I love that. Sam was a clever man.
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While I think this is a good idea I have a different approach to custom settings.
TLDR I use generic settings instead of material-specific because there are so many options and the list would get too long.
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There are so many materials to use, and so many variations in them. 1/8” BB ply for example: I’ve seen it range from 0.115” to 0.130”. As such a 1/8” BB ply setting isn’t really viable if you’re going for “barely cut through” power — what just makes it through thinner batches won’t cut thicker ones; what barely cuts thicker will char thinner batches and leave heavy flashback…
So what, now we make “BB THIN” and “BB THICK” settings? Bb medium too? It balloons quickly and the dropdown becomes a mess.
Likewise let’s say you do 1/8” maple hardwood and then do 1/8” walnut hardwood. I find that they are almost identical in terms of how much power to use. So do I make a “1/8 hardwood” setting or do I make a maple, a walnut, a Yellowheart, etc? What if my next batch is thicker, am I back at square one?
In the end I simply made a set of presets that are named for the most common combos of power and speed for the materials I use the most. “190/full”, “200/full”, etc for cuts and “350/15” , “450/5”, etc for scoring.
I don’t really do presets for engraves because there are too many variables. I have a couple like “engrave dark” and “engrave light”, but beyond that I go by feel mostly, only taking notes when I try something new.
I keep a google sheet of my notes about materials so I can look it up when I come back to a material I haven’t used in a while.
Lastly, for truly strange or uncommon material (engravable stickers, headliner foam etc), I don’t bother with an individual custom setting, instead using one I named “.Scratch”. [1] I use it like manual settings, but it’s stickier. If I know I’m going to do a few jobs in a row with an unusual material I’ll look up my notes, change the .Scratch, save it and go.
Anyway. My custom settings are critical to my workflow and I really like the way I use them. It’s quick, easy to set up and use, and most importantly I don’t waste material by trying to use settings that are attempts at being one size fits all.
The period at the beginning ensures it’s first on the dropdown order. ↩︎
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This.
Even for saved (custom or PG) settings, I run a small test before committing to a large project. A minute test costs far less than a sheet of material. Perhaps my optics need to be cleaned, perhaps the material is thicker than usual. No matter.
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