Thats already the reason for China - injection moulding is very cheap (once you have made the mould) and commodotized. It's assembling and packaging the parts that takes a lot of time/labor. It's the low labor cost of assembly that is the reason for China - a million 3d fab machines replacing a few injection moulders isn't going to change the time it takes to put the bits in boxes.

True - what we need is 500 years of experience of university knowledge available for free on some sort of free, static display, random access information retrieval system. Where anyone can sit down and just read the data directly.

Not sure what to call the volumes but you could store them in a modified tape library - without the tapes