Gil, this impression of the process of making a 3-D printed model grossly - by like two orders of magnitude - the amount of effort needed to go from a printed plan to a plastic part. Hopefully that's not the type of thinking behind the NCC's decisions. We're not in Star Trek where you can talk to "the replicator" and get a finished model three minutes later.
I really have no interest in 3-D models. I was just reading the Journal over my cereal and started thinking . . . OK, it's not scratchbuilt, fair enough. But isn't there also a rule about no prototype kits or test shots? Yup. . . . So if a guy uses a 3-D printer to create a set of parts with the identical breakdown and parts count of a typical Tamiya kit, assembles those pieces into a complete airplane or tank - trims the sprue, removes the mold marks, glues it up, fills the seams, paints and decals it - he can't enter it into the contest because a) It is specifically excluded from scratchbuilt and b) UNLESS a model is scratchbuilt, it can't be entered unless it is a commercially available kit.
I'm not talking about a 3-D version of those 1/288, one-piece recognition models from 75 years ago. I'm thinking of something like this guy's stuff where the kit has as much detail and complexity as a injection molded kit but it's printed instead. I think you can see that it is also much more complex than a resin kit - which is allowed. (An interesting follow-on: What if someone used their 3-D printed parts as masters to make molds and build the exact same model out of resin?)
To look at it another way, if Peter Jackson used his resources to create a WNW kit that he never offered for sale, a model made from that kit could never be entered in the show. That seems odd.
KL