> close to the price of the underlying metal

Never? Never for plastics either. It seems like there's always going to be a lot of cost in shaping these materials through carefully controlled very high temperature environments. On the plastic side of things just the filament you feed to a printer is a multiple of the cost of the plastic feedstock that goes into making the filament.

You can send off models and get them 3d printed in metal today reasonably affordably today, reasonable as in "considering the time and expertise that go into making the model making a one off part like this isn't breaking the bank" not "competes with mass manufacturing on cost".