No, it printed almost perfectly for me out of the box. The issues I've encountered are just the nature of 3D printing and not specific to the machine itself. Having it auto-level makes me almost cry with joy after 5 years of manually leveling with thumbwheels!

Yea man. You have any questions just hit me up. Like I said I've only had mine a few weeks but holy hell is it night and day between this and my last printer.

I definitely understand the fear. Auto bed leveling should make life a million times easier. None of my printers ever had it. If you decide to pull the trigger now, just make sure it has that feature. If not, Prusa is a pretty bulletproof option, even if you opt to assemble it yourself to save some cash.

The nice thing about 3d printing, is that the second-hand market is pretty good. So if you can't get it sorted, you may have some luck selling it locally. I ended up giving mine away lol.

I have Prusa MK3S+ printers in my makerspace. They're great. Very few issues. That said, I'm looking at a Sovol SV06 or maybe the plus for personal use just for the price difference. It was recommended to me by a guy with 15+ machines at a maker fair who prints as a business.

The prusa mini also gets a lot of solid recommendations, it does have a smaller print area though. I can't recommend a prusa enough however as a first printer, they have solid support and they're a tried and tested tool, I've got nearly 3k hours on my mk3s+ that I got I February and other than slight tweaks like swapping to abs printed parts, I've not had to do much to it.

With the mk4 being out, you may be able to find people selling their used mk3s+, which I don't know that I'd be concerned about based on my experience with their reliability. Their instructions are super detailed, you could also save a buck going for the kit but I can appreciate wanting something you can just go with, I did that too this year for the same reason, but I'd do a kit now that I have a known good printer.