A lot of their business model is seemingly based on making long-term sales from consumables. Their solution for multi-color printing is more convenient to use with filament sold by them because they embed information about the filament on proprietary RFID tags.
A couple days ago they announced locking down the API for their most expensive line of printers, locking most API calls to only their own software because of "security". Users are obviously upset.
Rumours for the reasons range from protecting themselves from user mods that replicate the RFID functionality on any filament by configuring the printer via API calls, to Bambu Labs wanting to launch some kind of subscription service for print farms.
> The only thing that really helps them make more money is wasteful multi-color printing.
They're slow to make improvements in this area, but they recently introduced some options to reduce the waste, like longer retraction before the color change. Plus as a user you can reduce the waste further by tuning flushing amounts, and you're left with the waste inherent to single-extruder multicolor printing.
Overall yes multicolor can be wasteful, but to me it's impressive that it exists in the first place