Depends on what broke, sometimes cheap is fine.

My old boss had the same take, calling it a crutch. But a training course I took framed it as the smart way to enforce standards. Manually copying styles just opens the door for tiny mistakes.

Two years for one pot seems like a long time to wait for a win. I get the excitement, but it's just a cooking pot from a few hundred years ago. It's not like you found a lost city or a chest of gold. In the grand scheme of things, it's a broken piece of someone's old kitchen. The real work is in the data from all those shards you've been finding, not the one thing that stayed in one piece.