Just for shits and giggles..... I'll throw one last thing at you. There are a large number of members here on the forum who are hobbyists that greatly enjoy the satisfaction of building their own lasers which is another very good route to go. It's not necessarily difficult, just time consuming and there is a great deal to be learned from gradually aquiring the parts and assembling something yourself. It can also be done piecemeal as you have money and time. I am by no means well versed in electronics, optics, CNC machines,etc, and have tackled it once. I've started another but haven't been able to touch it in about 4 months. My issue is a lack of time and an adequate work area.
The one thing I'm starting to find is that just as there used to be a lot of computer geeks that built their own computers and played the upgrade and tweak, upgrade and tweak, game... it's gotten to the point where a decent computer can be bought for so little money that it's almost not worth the time. Lasers have gotten so inexpensive (relatively speaking) that it's almost worth it to just buy something built, tested, warratied that just simply works right out of the box. You don't see as many build threads here as you used to. But keep in mind, you could buy or build a case, buy a green, a few small electronics and hardware bits and some scanners for a couple hundred bucks and grow from there.