"It would likely be similarly ridiculous to produce 5 widgets with a CNC" Are you sure about that? If the part has exceptionally precise requirements but was relatively easy to define the cutting path for (because it made use of existing tools to do so), I would think even a single widget might be more cheaply and accurately produced by CNC than manually. I actually worked on software that generated CNC routing paths for widgets produced in small quantities, and while it's true if the software was written just for any single widget it wouldn't have been economical, it was able to generate a large number of routing paths based on minor tweaks to the inputs. As far as I knew, the effort required to load up various path configurations and produce small numbers of widgets each time wasn't that significant.