No worries, with some time and effort you can definitely get quite decent print quality out of the really cheap ones, but at the $200 mark there is such good value for money now with machines that dont need copious upgrades to be safe.
I would say the Anet A8 would not be easy to pack up for storage, the frame is fragile and IMO once its built it's best to just find a place for it and leave it set up. I think some of the aluminum frame printers you might be able to disassemble the upper frame in one piece to store them, but I'm not sure.
Ive only had the printer for just under a year now but I'm more than happy to share what I have learned over the last few months
Ikea lack tables are only a couple of dollars each, they are 55cm cubed and they are a perfect size for printers that have a build volume of 220mm x 220mm. A lot of people use 1, 2 or 3 of them stacked together to store their printer(s) and you can even put sides on them to make an enclosure to make printing ABS easier. I'll try and remember to get a photo of mine later (it's still a work in progress) but essentially all the space you need is 55cm x 55cm of floor space to store the printer, filament and misc spare parts
Yeah pretty much, it's a Prusa i3 clone (as are almost all printers of a similar design that isn't actually a Prusa). The Prusa itself came from an open source project as well
Even the Ender 3 is a clone of a clone but it was one of the first to bring a good build volume and a sturdy aluminum frame to the low budget $200 price range. Before that most aluminium frame i3 clones were around the $500 mark. But since the Ender 3 came out a lot of manufacturers have been bringing out great aluminum frame budget printers to compete, some like the Anet E10 (I think it is) look good but still have a fair few issues, where as others like the Geeetech A10 seem to be getting even better reviews than the Ender 3. Either way both Creality and Geeetech have been getting good reviews as companies who stand by their products.
There is a lot on the market and it makes it hard to find the best one, but the competition is great for consumers! I just wish this competition to get quality printers into the budget price bracket started year ago!
If anyone has any other non Reef-Pi related 3D printing questions, there is a couple of great 3D printing threads on Reef2Reef with lots of friendly 3D printing reefers to answer questions so that this thread doesnt get detailed too much