Will,

My wife Shari does all the designing in ArtCam Pro so I can't help you much in the design area. I mostly did all the carving on the machine. I know she used Corel in the beginning but said it was too time consuming and limiting so she just bought a carving software. We are using the ShopBot now and it is a great machine. I used to spend a couple of hours hand finishing the CW carvings, but they come off the ShopBot very smooth and need no touching up. Frees me up to do other things in the shop. You might want to take a look at their benchtop model. The price is a little higher but the machine is much more suited for heavy duty work. The Bot seems to be pretty trouble free and cuts through all sorts of wood with no problem. We've even been cutting out different shapes now, which we didn't do before.

Reese