[badlucklottery]

Agreed. If you want to just make parts and not tinker with a CNC machine, get a Z1.

I had near-zero experience with CNC and got a Cavera Air last year and it mostly "just works" from the hardware side. I just fixture stuff and run my gcode, zero issues with the hardware. The Z1 seems to be even more streamlined w/r/t things like chip evacuation.

But, my god, Makera's firmware/software is fucking garbage. Especially the CAM workbench.

The community firmware and controller software (https://github.com/Carvera-Community) is so much better and feature-filled that it's kind of sad. They also have a tool library and post-processor for the FreeCAD CAM workbench in that repo which will let you make a clean break from Makera's terrible software.

On the upside: Makera apparently won't invalidate your warranty for using the community firmware/controller software, which is nice.