Your thoughts pretty well match mine with my 12".

I am sure some are tired of reading my posts stating the same thing but IMO the printer should be capable of producing good prints using the parts included with the kit. At least in my case the 12" wasn't capable of that.

What really opened my eyes to how poor my 12" prints were was when I bought my Daughter an XYZ Davinci Jr took it out of the box and within 15 min was printing. The very first part it printed was better than anything my Makerfarm ever produced. I have since then managed to get the majority of my print issues fixed by finally minimizing the warpage on the print bed. Between replacing the stock wood bed with Aluminum and installing a solidstate relay and setting up PID on the heat bed it has solved most of my banding issues. I still have some small periodic banding that I need to take care of but I am just tired of messing with it and want to print with it. I have ordered new Z rods and couplers and will get around to swapping them out one of these days.

I don't even want to try to figure out how much time, wasted filament and additional $$ I have thrown at my 12" to get it to the point it is now. It almost turned me away from 3D printing.