In case you're looking for advice: I went from being a daily HX machine (rocket) user to a Cafelat Robot at the beginning of the pandemic & haven't looked back.

In case you're looking for advice: I went from being a daily HX machine (rocket) user to a Cafelat Robot at the beginning of the pandemic & haven't looked back. It has zero warm-up time and I make better espresso with it more consistently than I ever could with the e61. I'm not sure I agree with you about 'most espresso machine owners', but if you do only care about the spro, I can highly recommend the manual approach.