Other than an RV the next options are TWS -supported, Quad IVC - defunct but support remains & Essemtec's - supported and their feeders have residual value if you then decided to do all your production and buy a better machine from their range. They all cost more and with the exception of the Quad are quite hard to find, people keep them because they don't make you want to kill someone.

My main concerns would be physical wear and tear rather than the electronics plenty of machines out there have had an easy life other have been worked hard. The support contracts from VSMT did not to my knowledge include an option for preventative maintenance and certainly when they were called on they never looked beyond fixing the immediate issue, no calibration checks, oiling, cleaning etc and one can only guess at what effect this had on their longevity.
VRPlacer, was due to be ready for people to nose at? I think he was mainly using the machine and its users as inspiration and market research.
I think without Mikes software it takes about 2-3 hours to type in a BOM and map it to a set of Gerbers & double check it, with 200-400 parts and 30-40 part numbers.
The first PCB or your test run on sticky tape might take 20 mins while you sort out the bits that are incorrectly entered or where the machine is being plain crap (offsets) after that I find 2.2 seconds/chip and 4 seconds/leaded device a good (if a little pessimistic) guesstimate for build time.
If I'm building something and there are a few parts that are 50 or less I rarely bother loading these, its quicker to place them by hand while the machine works, I also do this for parts I have no feeders for. I think allowing 10mins/lane for loading parts not yet on the machine is wise, so 1/2 a day to get ready to build the board mentioned above, however I am cautious and double/triple check everything, even at 1200cph that's a whole lot of rework if you load something in the wrong place.
If I'm building low volumes of something, I might only use the RV to place the high volume stuff (0.1uf 10k... )
I would certainly try and avoid a broker if you can, its not like they can help you with your purchase afterwards.