Hi Brianh

I will just say that any machine that uses rubber wheels on an uncovered aluminium extrusion in the presence of a bunch of sawdust is likely going to be a problem.
Profiled linear rails are very much superior and designed for purpose.

The sliding carriage on my spindle moulder is steel bearings running on a steel track, it takes only a small amount of dust to need cleaning off as it starts to get rough, this is a coarse machine in comparison to a CNC router. I can only imagine the bother of trying to clean all those little wheels, and the accuracy of small parts or V carvings will suffer pretty quick.

As for the vectric stuff I would go for vcarve desktop first then upgrade to pro if you need to. I don`t think cut 2d does v carve toolpaths. To be fair though vectric are very good at letting you just upgrade for the price difference and at least you actually own the software, a rare thing these days.

Ollie