Given current social trends, expect to see absurd DRM and other controls placed on it that limit it for completely arbitrary reasons so certain people can still make money.
On the whole though, this would radically alter society.
The whole basis of economics would collapse overnight, and people would wonder what the point in doing
anything at all is.
That's assuming you don't get some jerks trying to heavily restrict the thing to keep the benefits for themselves and screw anyone else over.
Zontar said:
One thing in Trek I never understood was why ships took so long to build in the Next Gen era. Replicators where explicitly used to make spare parts on the fly, so why not use a replicator-equipped space dock to build a ship in minutes out of an asteroid and some power generators? Really could have come in handy during the Dominion War. And it's not as if the idea wasn't there, since in Enterprise they came across an alien space station which could do just that.
Really, it's a lot of arbitrary handwaving for obvious plot reasons. (If making new ships is trivial, who cares if a few get destroyed?)
I think in-universe it's argued that the power demands of matter replication, (in particular, if the admittedly non-canon technical manuals are anything to go by, the energy requirements of elemental transmutation - Turning one element into another) are unreasonably high for most uses.
There's also some vague implications about how some materials are less practical to replicate than others.
For instance, an episode of TNG implied that a medical vaccine was 'too complex' to replicate.
Which sounds like a computer memory issue if you follow the argument of how a replicator functions.
Compression errors also get mentioned at times. Indicating the replicator patterns for most objects are large enough to warrant using lossy compression on them.
Then there's an issue of raw mass.
Again, using a non-canon source, the warp coils for a galaxy class starship weigh in at a combined mass of around 1 million tonnes.
Which, aside from anything else, is 25% of the overall mass of the entire ship.
That means, that for all practical purposes, the shipboard replicators aren't going to replicate that. Even a single coil is so huge you'd never manage with the kind of matter reserves a starship could reasonably carry.
(possibly why voyager didn't replicate it's own warp coils)
Of course, that limitation shouldn't be such a big deal for a shipyard, where a large supply of matter is expected to be available.
If I had to pin it to something that makes sense given the in-universe limitations of the technology I would say the combination of the replicator patterns taking up too much space for any computer to cope with on any practical level, and the raw energy requirements being absurdly inefficient for that kind of purpose would be the most likely explanations for it.
Just because the technology exists, doesn't mean you'd use it if you need 100 times the resources as a result.
Not for something like large-scale manufacture of starships at least.
