Requsting your opinions on this CNC mill

[Leav]

Hello,

My long term goal of acquiring a more serious CNC mill for my team is inching closer to completion.

We currently own and operate the Degem TP-MI, which is a basic CNC mill mostly suitable for milling plastics.

We are looking of moving upwards towards a more serious mill, and have been offered a very nice table top mill, similar to this model, with a DRO, with all the tooling required for a total of about $3750.

However this is a manual mill and I'm pretty sure I would like to have a CNC mill.

So I sniffed around online, and came across www.microproto.com, which sell two models of CNC mills:
The MicroMill 2000
The MicroMill DSLS 3000

both have the following in their product page:

A full desktop machining system with capabilities to produce most anything from very simple to very complex geometric forms in wood, plastic, aluminum or steel.

This will not come with the tooling, so I looked at this thread and i'll use the ball park estimate of $350 for tooling.

Since we are on a budget, and sneaking a CNC mill under the noses of the budget people is hard enough as it is, I was leaning towards the cheaper of the two above links, i.e. the "MicroMill 2000" (it seems to be no less powerful than it's big brother), and which costs $2295.

so that's a total of about $2650, not including the shipping (To Israel), and the taxes we might have to pay for it (taxes can be 25%-50% so that's about another $1000).

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So after that long winded introduction into the situation, here are some questions i'd like help with:

1. Am I making a blatant error in dismissing the manual mill? stories about people never using CNC mills to their full potential?
2. will the "MicroMill"s really be able to machine aluminum efficiently? what about steel? (they claim to be able to, but perhaps the claims are exaggerated?)
3. Do you know of any other similar CNC mills?
4. Any other thoughts about all this? stuff to look out for?

I really appreciate your help in this matter, the ChiefDelphi community is my main consultant in these matters.

Thanks!
-Leav