Sweet, i may start being more active on here now because of this new category haha. Anyway, I have a rostock max v2 from seemecnc. It took about 20+ hours to put it all together, but it was well worth it. It is a delta style printer so it can move quite fast and accurately as the print head is the only mass that is being moved. The extruder motor and build platform are totally stationary. I use repiteir firmware on my printer( though i have heard that marlin is also really good) and use both cura and slic3r as my preferred slicer's as each one does some things better than the other. I have made a few changes from the kit that you buy such as adding a e3d v6 hotend. With the e3d hotend and a 0.25mm nozzle, i was able to successfully print at 0.06mm layer heights. This here was my first print at a 60 micron layer hight.
- State of the art currently seem to be Delta printers like the Rostock and Kossel, but i hear they're less intuitive to tweak compared to standard cartesian designs. Also delta calculations are far more taxing on the electronics so you would need to use something with an ARM chip like the smoothieboard to drive it. Most other electronics are similar to either RAMPS or Sanguinololu which use Atmel mega 2560 and 1284p microcontrollers, respectively. If your printer has something similar, check if you can get Marlin to run on your electronics, it's one of the more actively developed firmwares.
- Personally i'd avoid anything related to Makerbot (or Takerbot, as it's known in the reprap circles). Despite all the fancy marketing there are plenty of employee reviews that say the company is a toxic working environment especially after being sold off to Stratasys. Don't expect anything innovative to come from there. Ultimaker on the other hand, are the best. Everybody likes them because they share everything with the open source community.
- If you're looking to speed up prints you will likely have to make the print head lighter. This most often means moving the stepper motors away from it and going for a bowden tube setup the way it's done on Ultimakers and all Delta printers.
- Does your printbed support 3-point levelling? If it doesn't you might want to consider that. The latest gimmick in the bed levelling department are Z-probes which measure the actual distance between the printhead and the bed at multiple points. Marlin should support these, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTghOLwdMWQ
- For print surface check out materials with a low thermal expansion coefficient like borosilicate glass. PEI, carbon fiber and SITALL are other good options, though they might not be as easy to find.
- Lastly, not sure what kind of hotends your makerbot clone uses but usually in cheap chinese printers you get these awful J-Head knockoffs that don't work very well. If that's the case, consider getting an original J-Head from hotends.com or perhaps an all-metal E3D V6 that will let you experiment with more exotic plastics like polycarbonate and nylon.
And finally here is a picture of the printer