I've been really interested for a while now in titanium, and while I think laser sintering is a really cool application, something caught my eye when trying to find videos about the material: some of the titanium-alloy hammers you can buy at the hardware store are made by molten metal casting in ceramic molds. For some reason it really fascinates me to see titanium being used that way, because it's not the way most places use it (it is a notoriously hard metal to work with). I wonder, are laser sintering and other techniques fundamentally slow or can they be improved to be more competitive?