I'm looking hard into lasers as well, as I am with Ink Pad printing. What I'm trying to discern is to what degree laser "engravers" can cut channels into stainless steel blanks with an eye to making cliches (clee-shays) or cliches (rhymes with glitches) not necessarily quickly but by eliminating the chemical etching and engraving steps completely. Design it, engrave it and print with it. This CAN be done commercially in only a matter of minutes, but pinning down the details for a possible DIY path has, so far, proven more difficult. Much of that is: "How deep can a given non-fiber cutting laser machine engrave," and/or "how many passes would it take to get the required depth?"
Whether or not a Fiber laser is actually needed to get even such engraving done, for example, or whether a CO2 or diode laser might suffice.
I'm not looking to cut thick stainless plates themselves, and stainless cliches might not even be necessary for short ink-pad runs--just use them up and engrave some more. Aluminum might even work well for say...engraving and printing a certain car number for a short run of hoppers. How many do you actually have to print anyway, on a short, custom run?
But also: It would be really nice to be able to cut thin brass sheet (to bypass the need for chemically etching thin parts), or to engrave circuit boards (far, far down my own list of fun things to do with a laser etcher/cutter...but I could loan out the machine time to someone else).
And last...and this one could be very important...DRILLING micro size holes into any number of materials. Doing this relates to the exact size of the laser dot, or pretty closely to it, but even a relatively crude laser engraver can still outperform a #80 drill bit by a wide, wide margin. Provided it doesn't just nuke the material being drilled into anyway.
One of the two machines I'm currently eyeing myself is the xTool F1, not because of it's portability or it's speed really, but because of a laser spot size of about 0.003mm, and a multi-repeat pass accuracy of about 0.002mm. That's just tighter than anything I would need anyway, but it would be nice to be able to count on it if you could get it without breaking the bank.
Give me that and a decent pad-printing machine--wouldn't have to be automatic, either, if I was printing just for myself (many of those can be had for under $500 US)--and I'd be as happy as a clam, I think. For a long, long time.