alt Hacker NewsThink how long it takes for a 3D printer to finish a single design with 0.1mm resolution. Now scale that down to 10nm. The time to complete goes up by 10^12. A 1 minute design would scale to 2M years.
There's a reason e-beam lithography is only used to make masks, and why it's one of the most expensive parts of the manufacture.
E-beam lithography absolutely is/can be used to manufacture one-off chips.
The problem isn't lithography, though, it's all of the adjacent processes (ion implantation and a dozen other things) that are fab/process-specific and require even more complicated/expensive equipment.
Shuttle runs give you a true-to-process tapeout and are dirt cheap, so only universities and the like bother with direct-write.