i think no one has really hit on the fact that if you currently do not offer embroidery, then you are going to have NO IDEA how to digitize anything...its truly an artform. ...we outsourced our digitizing at first...it was coming back 95% right. I'd have to change the 5%, 3 times, myself to get it looking like something i'd want to produce (i had to do this because my guy was slow and foreign, my US guy was too pricey lol. (It wasnt that he wasn't going to fix it, but i could finish the whole order before the revision was sent). So after fixing and fixing and fixing, i knew what to look for that was causing sewout issues to begin with. so then i started doing it from scratch everytime....quality was really great and i didnt have to rely on anyone else. HOWEVER, i was WASTING HALF A DAY SOMETIMES on intricate pieces. Now that I have Wilcom that has all changed, its pretty much click and done but not every starter has $15,000 to throw at software...after a while you'll get sick at the money you're throwing to your digitizer as well and still be at their mercy when you're the one with the embroidery machine....
so for me, i think i'd spend less time on which machine i was going to buy, and more on how the crap am i going to find time to learn to digitize/do it myself or how am i going to afford to pay someone else to digitize and LOSE TIME WAITING....got to factor those in.