It’s all gcode.

https://www.printables.com/model/4667-all-in-one-temperature-bridging-tower-pla-petg-gco

It’s possible that you’re going too slow. It sounds nuts, but I’ve seen degradation of print quality on my homebuilt ANET A8 by going with lower speeds and trying to play around with flow rates.

What I ended up doing with that machine was printing a series of temperature columns, flow rate columns, and speed columns to zero in on the smoothest print. I did all that with my most commonly used PLA and then PETG. I’ve had to make very small tweaks for some variants (for example, matte PLA requires about 4% more flow rate than my baseline).

It’s been years so I don’t remember exactly, but I think I went through three loops of the towers: Find best temp (five degree steps between 180-220C), use that temp to find best flow rate, use those two to test speed. Loop back and do each test again using the best result from the prior two and adjusting each floor of the tower in smaller increments. I think I only had to do temp twice. My profile for that machine and my bulk 3DMARS PLA filament is 208C at 105mm/s and 103% flow rate.

The SV08 that I’ve been using recently is a completely different animal (corexy vs bedslinger). I haven’t had to tweak much at all to get ridiculously fast and good quality prints. I’m actually about to install the enclosure kit and try out ABS for the first time. Since I set up this machine I haven’t even powered on the A8.

Also, have been using Orca exclusively without issue so I can’t really lend advice there.

Good luck!

Sovol has been generally decent in my experience (SV08), but they’re kinda positioned between the “tinker” and “turnkey” markets. What wall are you running into?

Bambu would have been my recommendation before they tried to lock people into the cloud connection. They’ve reversed course (for now) due to the backlash, but they’ll do it again when they think they can get away with it.

At this point I’d probably say Prusa, but I don’t have firsthand experience with them so that’s based solely on what I’ve read. If you’re looking for something that will “just work” you’re going to need to search for what’s in your price range and then read everything you can about the models in question on support forums and reddit (ew). You can also learn a lot by watching YouTube videos but you have to be really careful to see past the “they gave me this for free/paid for the video so I’m going to minimize the negatives” crap.

I kinda disagree with this, in certain contexts. There is some value in learning how the machine works by self-assembling a kit (or buying off-the-shelf parts and assembling from an open-hardware guide). Identifying the things that can be upgraded, tinkering with firmwares and nozzles, printing parts to upgrade the machine itself… all are a fun aspect of the hobby, if you’re interested in the hardware side.

But if you just want to make figurines from squirty plastic, then yeah just buy a moderately-priced, well-supported turnkey printer (though probably not a Bambu, because they’re sliding toward enshittification).