The play here is obviously that they want 3rd party services to use Bambu Connect instead of direct protocol integration. They will make Connect easy and direct too much work. That is what all the Panda talk was about. That way, when Bambu inevitably changes the model ( eg. Subscription ), we will have to pay to get access to the ecosystem. But Bambu will be able to claim that it is not them. We still support developer mode they will say, it is the evil third parties that do not.

We need to make sure that dev mode becomes the de facto default. Don’t fall for connect.