and I think you really have to be good at making your own stuff for a printer to be a good purchase.

It really depends on what you want to use it for. I have the skills to make decently complicated parts to print, but 9 times out of 10 I'll just see if someone has already made something similar and use that instead. If you know you're gonna be prototyping a bunch of things or testing weird shit out then yeah you should probably know how to operate a CAD program, but if your use case is, "this plastic thing on my very common appliance broke, I wonder if I can print a replacement?" or "these little flexible dragon things are cute" then you just need to know how to use a search bar and your slicer.