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I will note that s-curves are really a servo thing, not a stepper thing. with traditional stepper drivers you just have steps and the motor tries to stop after each step. It’s only with FOC on steppers or with servos that talking about acceleration/deceleration and it’s derivative force make sense as you are not dealing with hardware designed for continuous movement.
industrial processes move slowly, CNC machines have not finished the transition from expecting the operator to manually punch in g-code on a big panel at the machine.
3d printing has gotten CNC out into a much bigger world, and driven prices of light CNC brains, drivers, motors, rails, software down and in the process has wildly extended the number of people who understand it and places that it’s used. But it has been based on simple steppers for the most part (with some higher-end machines having ‘servos’ that are mostly steppers with encoders to detect missed steps)
a lot of CAM software (and a lot of gcode interpreters) don’t implement the more complex gcode, they just do linear moves and assume that there is no limit to acceleration (let alone force). They get away with this as the machines are generally light enough and flex enough to absorb the shocks.
but people are now noticing the effects of this in their 3d prints, and as the size, weight, and power of machines increase, these issues are harder to ignore
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