Opinion: It is time for Prusa to add the Mini to their farm
Back when the Mini first came out, Joseph stated that they developed it in part to be able to expand Prusa's production print farm faster with a lower per-printer cost than the MK3S+. While I'm glad they have used all available production capacity over the last 18+ months to reduce the lead times on the Mini down to basically nothing now, it sounds like they haven't put any Minis in their farm yet. Of course, this means we haven't gotten much public information into how well they work at farm-scale.
I get that they wanted to get Prusa Connect up and running as a customer-facing product first. But, now they have it in beta testing with other print farms. Why not also beta test Prusa Connect in their own separate "garden" of Minis making parts in addition to what is still being produced in the main farm for daily production?
I think now is the time that they need to allocate some of the Mini production to "seed" this beta garden, even if it slightly lengthens customer wait times again for a short while. They can then use garden to build more Mini parts to plant back into the garden making it bigger. (Yes, I realize there's also non-printed Mini parts that they'd have to increase the production of.) Once the garden is big enough, continue with printing Mini parts and add the smaller MK3 parts to build up a stock. That way, once the XL gets closer to reality, you'll have excess capacity so you can shift to making the printed parts for the XL. Hopefully, this will prevent having huge lead times for the XL, although I think the higher price of the XL will help regulate the demand a bit. You'll also have gained the process knowledge for printing Mini and MK3 parts on the Mini.
Also, having Minis in the garden making Minis, and being very public about it, is just going to help the sales of the Mini even more. Right now, when Prusa says "The MK3S+ you just bought is actually a bit better than the nearly identical MK3S units that have made thousands of MK3S and MK3S+ units for years.", it speaks to longevity, durability, and "it just works" in a way that no other company that I know of can. Time to bring that to the Mini.
What do you folks think of this?