Hi Tex,
Apologies for the very delayed response on all of this - we’ve just finished our final few moving days between office buildings and haven’t had much time to sit down to address your inquiries.
The AltMill aims to target the more ‘prosumer’ audience of makers, within which C3D’s 5 Pro does fall under. We aren’t necessarily looking to match anything specifically ‘feature for feature’, but rather improve on the performance of the LongMill platform and offer this at a 4x4 size.
With regards to some of these QC aspects, we’ve always made sure to be diligent with QC standard procedures for our LongMill, and quickly offering support or replacements for any outliers in this.
For an upcoming product like the AltMill, it’s still a bit too early in the product development phase to tell you exactly what these procedures and systems will look like, but you can be assured the necessary parts and assemblies will be well tested before anything ships out. To answer your last question - our internal QC team handles this quite rigorously. Even when suppliers will assure us of parts that meet our specifications, we always check these for fit and functionality ourselves.
We try to be as transparent as possible about this sort of stuff, so you’ll likely see more on this topic in the near future as development for this continues. Let me know if there’s anything else you’re curious/interested in seeing and we can hopefully address this in future development updates.