I needed (wanted really) to make some complex parts which I was already making manually using multiple setups on the manual mill with a rotary table and corner rounding cutters, this prompted me to buy a small CNC mill, fix it's issues, then discover I needed to buy and learn CAD/CAM/CNC.
I currently have a Siemens based 4-axis VMC and a Siemens based 2-axis lathe.