Hood: I agree with you, but the reality is that I just have limited time (and patience) and I really can't get involved with another forum. You know how it is, once you start posting, you get caught up in threads and then you get e-mail notices of activity, . . next thing you know more hours are burned. So for a lurker, there are good reads over there about the Granite and others, most seem to be using the drives with much larger and higher end stuff than would be typical for Mach users. I have no way of testing with anything but Mach and one small and one large (relatively speaking) DC brush servo.
vmax; Exactly, The VSD-E is sort of on the border between 'commercial' and 'DIY'. My thinking is that the products you mentioned would all be reasonably represented by the servo drive's step/dir performance in Mach using a typical inexpensive DC brush motor. This would address the 'DIY' side, which is also the limit of what I can test anyway.
The general lack of response from the Mach forum on this drive, together with it's cost, complexity, capabilities and position as an 'entry level commercial' drive, have me thinking that it may not be worth while to review it for use with MACH since there are products at half the price that are suitable for what a typical Mach user (if there is such a thing) would be interested in. Perhaps drives in this category are better reviewed by people with big machines using commercial controllers and high voltage DCBL or AC servos, which is really what the VSD-E is aimed at. The 'unstallable' stepper is an interesting creature, but It seems counterproductive to spend big on a VSD-E for the purpose of using a cheap stepper motor as an AC servo. It is an interesting topic, that for sure.