That "3 hours manually assigning addresses" part is the real cost people forget. It's not just the time, it's the human error risk. Now someone has to keep a perfect spreadsheet forever or the next tech is lost. Static makes sense for servers, but for a printer? You're just building a future headache.

Your neighbor is totally right. I built a web scraper once and got lost trying to make it perfect. Had to delete everything and just make it fetch one page of text, like @averymartin was getting at. Seeing that one dumb line print to the console was the win. Now I literally write "dumb version" as a comment at the top of my file to remind myself.

That tent trick is next level commitment. I'd probably just drive an extra hour for a darker spot.