Ok so I'm going to up my game and start contributing to this thread!

I am determined to relocate the spool in a more compact way. This needs to be solved before anything else. Once this is done I will restart the design of the enclosure based on this new and improved, more compact volume. I want to be able to pick the enclosed printer up and have everything be in one piece that I can transport.

The first thing I'm going to try is to move the location of the spool behind the printer so that the that from the front, the spool appears to be a circle which is tangent to both the top of the printer and the left sides of the printer.

I'm also kicking around the idea of it being sideways on bearings in thin drawer underneath which the printer can rest on top of.

Makerbot seems to do a back mounted spool only because they have a bowden tube that guides the filament right out of the spool and curves it around to the top. I ordered a PTFE tube to try this out to see if its possible to reroute the spool without any issues and will update once that once it's working.