I think Jazz maybe wasn't quite clear enough with mentioning that it's full servo systems that he wouldn't recommend for a complete beginner (I wouldn't either, unless they were the most suitable option).

Closed loop steppers aren't really any harder to setup than normal steppers. The only additional thing over a normal stepper system you have to do, is wire up the encoder, but if you can wire everything else on the machine, that's likely to be a problem.