Interestingly, Laserhub is not a highly managed marketplace — last month they had >>500 orders and couldn’t handle that if they would need to manage all of them. For the very high baskets, there is some handholding involved though.

I think high variance is in favor of marketplaces because the marketplace helps in discovery and aggregation. I agree that for initial liquidity it can be harder, therefore it makes sense to focus on a specific niche to build initial liquidity.