sheepsail

I also have both Taig and a Sherline lathes with many attachments which I use interchangeably.  At the moment these are boxed up.
 
My main lathe though is a Präzi from East Germany.  These were dumped in the US in the 1980s, and 1990s.  When they were replaced by the Swiss lathes. 
 
The lathe is not so much about the lathe itself.  It is about the attachments and tooling.  The collets and such what hold the work.  Some of the best come from Cowels in England which make some excellent stuff.
 
My other hobby is watchmaking so I have a few of warchmaker lathes as well.    I had a friend who had a Sears Atlas lathe which I loved.   Ironically to best make the tiny watch parts a big tool and die lathe is something I dream about.   With a big lathe one can make the fixtures for the small lathe.
 
As I get deeper into model ship building I am looking forward to seeing if I can use this equipment to turn toothpicks into the tiny fixtures the model so demands.
 
Woodworking and watchmaking prior to World War 1 in the 1920s was done with hand held tools.  (there were stories of master watchmakers making lathes from three large horseshoe nails.)  So it becomes about sharpening the gravers.
 
The critical thing about a lathe is a parameter called run out.  the other is swing.   Runout is how round you can make the part and is determined by the bearings. Air bearings are the best. Babbit works surprisingly well.  Babbit is tin lead solder so it is liquid when the bearings are spinning and creating heat.  So a cheap lathe or dremel will have cheap bearings.  So one side will be out of round where the tool catches. 
 
Swing is the largest item that can be turned without banging into things.
 
Lead screws are what allow items to be replicated.  Such were done with patterns.  This was industrialized in the 18th century. (1700s)   Milling is also considered lathe work.   This is also when the punch cards came about then the paper tapes, which could create the rivets and such. Cams could move the tooling and such in amazingly complex patterns.  Someone realized that everything could be created with an infinite number of sin and cosine waves.   These were called "imaginary" numbers.     
 
Alan Turing used this abstraction  to make a machine which could move a string (finite infinity) back and forth and make marks on it.  Then use the marks to move the string.   Such is what a machinist does when turning the handles of a lathe (2D) or a mill (3D)  Good machinist are great at arithmetic, pretty much human computers (what the word originally meant.)   They can feel all of this intuitively.  (the cards (digital) /cams(analog) record what they do for playback.) 
 
What a lot of people do not know about a guy named Babbage in the 1830s and designed the first computer.  First he had to make (or invent) a lathe to make it.   Leonardo da Vinchi had documented the lathes used by the Greeks and Romans (and Egyptians) and made the Antikythera device.   According to Archimedes a screw is an inclined plane or triangle.  (which is what a sine wave looks like when graphed)   So Babbage had to find the perfect screw. (rimshot)   His mechanics Clement and Withworth fought over who actually invented the machine 19th century lathe.   Whitworth got the credit.   And screws are all now standard shaped.  In reality all three invented the modern lathe.  Ego can sometimes set thing back a generation or more. 
 
As a child I met Frank Oppenheimer.  (yes him.)  Who was working on a lathe behind a wooden partition I could hardly look over at the ExplOritiorum.  He told me a lathe was a special tool since It could make a copy of itself.  In other words It could make anything.  Such statements like that keep me up at night.
 
Ironically AI, uses this same statistical math.  To make copies of ideas.  Like a panto-graph, which lathes and milling machines use to make things larger and smaller.  This device shows that everything is an infinite sum of waves around a circle. I guess what the Theosophist call vibrations.  This is called a space time transform.  Often called a Fourier transform after some 18th century dude who was good with lathes and estimating things like the population of France was after they cut the head off the leaders.   He and his friends also measured exactly how large the coastline of France was.  Ben Franklin was doing similar things in America with Kites and governments.  (did you know Franklin invented the spark plug?  Fun at parties, Volta used it to light farts on fire. Which is why electricity is measured in volts.  Steam engines and internal combustion engines are also abstractly lathes.)
 
In the 1960s and 1970s this math was done with a computer. Some guys named like Cooly and Turky made Fourier transforms fast.   GPUs use matrix math billions of times a second to display images.  Now abstract ideas.  Even more so that there is some weird thing called spin, what creates magnetism or polarization in light.   So I think Mr Oppenheimer was right.  That the universe is some sort of quantum lathe.
 
Not sure how to fit one other useless abstract bit of info into this digression.  A way of visualizing Fourier's singularity. Which is a pixel.  In space a pixel looks like a square or cube.  In time it looks like a Mexican hat with  wide brim or probably a better image ripples on the surface of a pond.   These things also have sound.  (and color) what we call frequency.   This is also what happens at the center of a lens where all the light ray meet.  One can make a lens with a lathe.  So we come about here in a full circle.  AI is simply simulating what is happening at the center of a lens.  (and we know what happens when one uses magnifying glass and the sun. Pirates only have one eye as they had to learn how to properly use a sextant or spyglass.  Do not look at sun with remaining eye.)  
 
None of which answers what brand lathe is best.  Personally I'd give emphasis on anything Swiss, since that is what the other countries aspire to. 
 
(no AI was used in the creation if this ramble.  -- otherwise it would make sense.) 
 
-julie