Ignoring the fact that our drive train was slow as death, 1:40-1:45 in
this video gives a good picture of our 2008 cascade forklift (and the World's Biggest Roller Claw) in action.
We made one enormous mistake in its design, and that was using steel cable instead of belts. Belts good. Cable bad.
A second mistake was that the CIM was utterly unassisted by any kind of force spring or other mechanism... My only excuse for that is that we didn't really know what we were doing, and it was well better than our tetra lift design a few years prior!
Even so, it worked pretty well...
By general feelings on cascade lifts is that they work just fine and are not difficult to build, and in the right circumstance are a good solution for lifting things.