Old Ames lathes are beautiful 
Yes, and if I remember well you also mentioned working at company that was grinding carbide tools. Or was that someone else? I make mostly low precision stuff like molds for composite parts (for example for non-military UAVs), and recently designer furniture which is even nicer, because nobody cares about precision, it has to just look good. I previously worked as a scientist, but gave up because it increasingly felt like a rat-race.
You don’t even need closed loop for CNC - it would work really well with just ballscrews, stepper motors and a simple controller. It would be also really cheap to do this way. I recommend HIWIN ballscrews.
To be honest I never wrote more than a few lines of Gcode - modern CAM software is so good that there’s rarely a need to do so.
I’ve just seen their video and it looks really rigid. I prefer 24k rpm spindles with ceramic bearings, but having a 30 taper is nice. Mine only has a taper for ER32 collets, so changing tools is annoying, but due to high RPM and good balancing it works well even with very small endmills, like 0.4mm diameter.
When you start making it, post photos of progress in the crafting thread, I’d love to see it:
FreeCAD has recently seen a lot of progress - be sure to build from the most recent version on github and enable assembly module (they finally implemented assembly constraints). My personal favorite is SolveSpace - it’s a very simple parametric CAD modeler with amazing geometry constraints and assemblies. It’s also best to build from source:
And BlenderCAM (especially with OpenCAMLib) really shines on extremely complex stuff that takes days to machine:
https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/happy-mutant-bazaar/157918/2?u=74hc595
