So the popularity of the first tentacle phone holder has led to my making no less than five move of these guys in different colors: purple, light green, light pink, crimson, and orange.
In the meantime, I have been thinking a lot about stepping a little away from 3D printing and getting back more into scratchbuilding. Why am I doing something that is more difficult, less precise, and potentially less attractive. It is back to that “process, not product,” mantra. Yes, I could just have my printer print out tiles while I sleep, but I am not actually creating anything in those moments–the designer did. So I am trying to get back into more hands-on aspects of the hobby and hope to share more of the elements of this change soon.
Strange Vistas 
You have articulated clearly the reason for my own discontent with 3-D printing. You might be learning how a machine works but you’re not really making very much once you’ve done the layout in 3-D software. If you’re not doing the layout you’re not doing very much. Maybe keeping the machine running, troubleshooting… but not much else.
Oh, I’ve gotten very skilled at taking the damn thing apart, cleaning, repairing, tweaking, etc. but have never picked up 3D design. It’s a bit of a mental shift to go from “what can I find online to copy” to “what do I want and how do I make it,” but I feel like it is a good one.
This insight may help.
When I was printing 3D models on the regular doe kids in school, I had to remind them that all things in a three-D model have an inside and an outside. You have to imagine that every rock, every tree, every human being is hollow, and that they have an inside surface and an outside surface. And those surfaces cannot touch one another. If you were to model a human being with a stomach, and an internal intestinal tract to the anus, that would also have an inside and outside surface. Every failed 3-D print that we made, We had to analyze to understand why it had failed. Among student models, the answer was almost always an inside-outside-touching problem. 80% of the time, this was the problem. Among downloaded models, this was almost never the problem. Only 15% of models failed the inside outside test.
If you start there, you may have more success