Skepticism, Science & Pseudoscience

For the people who worked them, they were labor intensifiers, forcing people to adapt to the speed of the machine instead of having a home based weaving business that would adapt to the weaver. While a few skilled weavers were put to work designing textiles, most ended up (if they were lucky) doing the backbreaking work of threading those old machines and being completely disconnected from either the planning or the final result. The effect was dehumanizing to the weavers even as it drove down the price of high quality cloth for everybody else.

The Luddites had a few valid points, in other words. There should have been room for cheap cloth from the machines and luxury cloth from master weavers but the latter only happened for the aristocracy and there weren't enough aristocrats to keep them all employed.