I have an Ender 3 S1 that I use every couple of months at this point because it’s just such a pain to use. I have to adjust the bed tramming and z offset and run auto bed leveling for every single print and often times that’s still not good enough.
It will often take 30+ minutes just to get the first layer going down successfully.
Is this a me problem or did I lose the creality lottery?
Like others said, consistent leveling can be a pain on cheap printers like ender. Your printer have 4 leveling screws while you need only 3 points to define a plane. 4 screws are recipe for problems on such a small plate, and then they also ship deformed bed plates or frame…
There are better quality machines available, but there are also so many people with enders that print amazingly well. So you have to decide if you want to dig deep enough to fix/upgrade/tune/thinker until quality is accaptable. Some people enjoy tuning more than printing, while some want to spend money on more like plug&play experience