I feel your pain, that's why I setup with PP BOB originally as the budget just wouldn't stretch over Xmas period so I could play with it, do some calibration and decide if I got on with linuxcnc before spending £300 on hardware which locks me into a vendor I haven't even tried.

I remember you saying you've used mach before so being locked in is probably not an issue to you.

When I was able to sell a kidney I got my electronics ;)

Ironically now I have a machine with good latency I can run it at 9m/min no issues from the PP BOB with 8 microsteps which has made the mesa less essential but obviously I'm still going to use it.