@palmercr From how active you are in the forum I had assumed you already have your unit… sorry to hear otherwise.
I think the argument, in essence, boils down to every individual buyer’s will to take a risk. that has always been -and still is- true about all of us buyers, for international buyers it’s just a bigger risk.
personally, after having to replace the first unit I got my GF finally chooching (which included a few trips Canada-USA). I started burning a few projects, I see the potential and am excited about the possibilities.
But I also see the issues:
the App is extremely basic right now. many basic functions that are present in virtually any graphic program, and that you intuitively believe will work are just not present (few examples: if you have multiple artworks, selecting the right one is complicated, no alignments, I don’t think you can rotate artwork, and more).
first time I proudly uploaded my first design I was greeted by 3 or 4 red windows (no clip path, no text support, and I forget what else).
Alignment on my machine is off. yes, it might be usually within 1/4" or so, so it might be within spec. but how does that help me? if I need to create an jig or template, it might as well be off 5". the whole drag and drop was to me a big selling point, if not the biggest (apart from price).
now you have to adapt your workflow to fit the machine, as opposed to the other way around.
auto-focus relies on you measuring the material and entering the dimension in app, and even FP material needs to be double checked, so there might as well be no focus.
and continuous focus will never happen: I’m willing to bet money with anyone on this forum that follow focus is just never going to happen with the units we have at home. definitely not the way it was portrayed in the fundraiser demo, and almost certainly not any other reliable way. the only possible way with our units would be if the GF actually scans the material entirely before cutting, takes a picture of every scan (hundreds of them) and uploads it to the cloud, does the math etc. but since the whole process relies on a wide angle camera that cannot be user-calibrated taking a picture of a skewed laser point over one of 100s possible materials, it is inherently flawed, in my humble opinion. (hopefully dan and other engineers at GF are geniuses and can pull it off, then I’ll eat my words.)
so it’s not a bed of roses, it’s a tool with a learning curve, with limitation and possibilities.
I’ll end up with a question for those who already received their units:
knowing now what the GF can do, if you had received the gf free to try but today had to decide between returning it or keeping it but pay full price: what would you do?