Better slicer?

[curious aardvark]

Still totally in budget for the near future.

How much manipulation can you do? For example, it's driving me nuts that on smaller prints I can't just duplicate the mesh so that I can print multiple pieces at once. On another print the original file I found doesn't have a flat bottom, and that's causing printing issues.

Would I be able to do those things with this software?

You can duplicate and print multiples on ALL the slicers I've seen and used. S3d will (it says) optimise the parts for faster printing. I usually do them by hand as I can put them closer together :-)
But yeah duplicating parts is a doddle. (but then it is with makerware, cura and slic3r as well)

The flat bottom thing, yeah sort of. With s3d you can move the model so the base is below the print bed.
You can do that with makerware as will, but makerware still prints the whole mode (weird but true) S3D ONLY prints the part above the printbed.
That's useful.

It all depends what printer you have. If you're printer is normal gcode compatible then cura or slic3r are probably just as good as s3d for 90% of printing requirements.

The biggest issue I have with s3d is the fact that it only prints alternate layers in it's infill. This creates really weak models that snap sideways very easily.
For strength I use makerware, the infill is contiguous. Ie it builds a solid honeycomb within the shell. This is really really strong.
Why s3d can't add in that feature - I don't know. It's the single worst thing about it.

[RobH2]

The biggest issue I have with s3d is the fact that it only prints alternate layers in it's infill. This creates really weak models that snap sideways very easily.
For strength I use makerware, the infill is contiguous. Ie it builds a solid honeycomb within the shell. This is really really strong.
Why s3d can't add in that feature - I don't know. It's the single worst thing about it.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with that. It's possible that you have the 'Print Sparse Infill Every' setting set improperly. If it's at '1' then it prints the infill on every layer. If it's set on '2' it will print infill on every other layer and so on. You can really make a mess if you set it to '4' or something. What's nice is that you can also print a solid layer or diaphragm every 'x' layers. So if you wanted a stronger part and didn't want to use 100% solid infill, you could print a solid internal layer every 5 layers if you wanted to and in-between those would be the normal infill.

My parts are as strong as with any slicer I've used. It doesn't have a half-dozen infill algorithms available that others might, but for most parts under 8", I think it's way stronger than is necessary. You'd need NASA to run some tests to see which of the internal infill shapes are functionally stronger at a small scale. I'd bet the variation between them, even if extreme looking to a test bench score, are nominal in everyday practice. You can manually set the infill to print in any angle between 0 and 360 degrees and you set them individually. I can set the infill to 45 and -45 as well as 30, 15, 0, 90, 14, -12 (I think you see my point) and it will build lines of fill at all of those angles. At some point it gets absurd. But, I do not share the feeling that S3D creates weak parts that snap sideways. What allows parts to snap sideways is poor layer adhesion and improper settings can cause that with any slicer.