Out of curiousity, I downloaded the MillMage Pro pre-release to try out. First impressions for relief carving are strong, as it is incredibly fast to go from a terrain height map (the relief project I’m experimenting with) to usable roughing + finishing gcode. I am also looking to laser etch onto the carve as well, so staying in the LightBurn ecosystem would be a bonus.
That said, I do find there are far fewer “knobs to turn” given the type of results I am/was trying to achieve. As anyone who has used Fusion for toolpath generation will know, there are so many different options and settings you can experiment with to try and achieve specific results.
Circling back to the initial question, I would say stay with Fusion since it’s what you use for your CAD, and deal with the CAM learning curve (which can be steep) unless / until you need something Fusion doesn’t do. The ability to efficiently prepare relief carves may be that thing - but I know (at least for me) I can make Fusion do what I need, even though it’s not always the easiest (and can be quite slow) for generating relief carving.
I haven’t been posting many projects lately, but if you check out my last post in the Amazing Fail category (Terrain Experiments - and a Y Axis glitch?) you can see the results of using Fusion’s 3d adaptive clearing (now called 3d adaptive roughing) and a 3d parallel finishing toolpath. Small update on the failure - I think my machine’s acceleration settings were still way too high from when I was beta testing the SuperLongBoard, and so the high speeds the ball end mill I was using went beyond what the machine could deliver, resulting in missing steps. At any rate, you can see in that post the results of a roughing step with a 1/2 inch endmill, then part of the finishing pass with a ball mill (before it lost steps).