That's interesting, the Bambu slicer actually does let you control how much, if at all, you purge during switches - I might try just setting it to 0 and seeing what I end up with..
I don't understand this. Who is supposed to do anything in this hobby? If you wanna print in gray and then paint, go for it. If you wanna print in multicolor, go for it.
I wonder if a slicer could hide the transitioning color inside the print instead of making a separate purge tower. I don't know that the cause of the filament popping is, but maybe that could be minimized like this too?
The Bambu slicer does offer such a thing, the results vary depending on the colors in question though, if the color it's purging is black, and most of the print is white, then the black that gets flushed into the infill is going to be pretty visible under the white outer walls. This can be mitigated by thicker walls, and ofc its less of an issue when dealing with colors of different, but similar, shades
I've found that the best way to reduce multicolor waste is to try and setup your model in the first place so that it uses the smallest number of color changes possible, but ofc whether or not you have much control over that will depend largely on the model in question
As others have said few slicers support printing a second model as the wipe/purge object, but Stefan from CNC Kitchen happens to be one of the few people on earth that owns a filament recycling setup so these poops might get recycled as well.
That would involve remelting the filament and re-extruding, which can be bad for strength. Maybe you could print the functional print at the same time and use it as the purge tower?
In fairness to multicolor printing in general, he couldn't have picked a worse multicolor model for generating waste. You want to optimize for as few color changes as possible. Just the other day I printed some pokeballs in full color and it was (iirc) around a 0.4:1 waste:print ratio - which is still a fair bit of waste, but nothing like 2.5, thanks to the fact that the colors are layered.
Gradients are the absolute worst thing for multicolor printing, this printer was probably doing 3-6 color switches per layer
The printer is a Bambu Labs X1C. It has one hotend but several spools available. It can switch between spools but has to purge the molten material already in the hot end.