Let me tell you a story that illustrates my point. Before discovering the human tooth, I used to work as an artisanal metalsmith. Specifically, I was a blacksmith. Still am, it never leaves you, but it was my daily job. Blacksmithing has always been a trade dominated by extreme secrecy- the guilds hoarded their tricks and techniques, and master smiths jealously accumulated their personal insights and innovations, to keep other smiths from profiting off of their experience.
So what has that tradition done for blacksmithing in the present day? It guaranteed that most of the tradition itself has been lost, after industrialization and cheaper manufacturing processes took their inevitable toll on the country smithy. There are forging and smelting techniques that we literally cannot reproduce any more, not with all our technology and empiricism. They died with their masters, who cannot profit from them from the grave, and everybody else pays for it afterwards. A lot of people put a lot of time and effort into trying to reproduce a particular alloy or forge-welding pattern or decorative flourish, just so we can have that bit of knowledge again. And I say 'we', not 'they'- because the secrecy of the trade is largely gone, in the era of what we call 'revival blacksmithing'. Now that there are no guilds or old masters to apprentice under, the knowledge -must- be free, for there to be any practicing of the trade at all. Smiths eagerly share their experience and their little time-saving tricks or neat techniques, even if they do it for a living, because otherwise the trade will die a second death, and it's worth keeping alive.
I think it would be a tremendous shame for the wealth of knowledge available from the old-hand dental tech masters to die out and be lost to the world because those masters withheld their life's experience in the hope that it would turn the tide against digital dentistry, 3D printing and Chinese-milled zirconia, you know what I mean?
