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One thing that trumps all else Rob is this questions........'do my subs look ok'?
If they do then don't worry about what your mount is doing. Comparing guiding with others will just end in frustration because you will never get as a good a graph and the person next door (and being the internet that person next door may not be telling you the truth on how their mount performs anyway!)
Having said the above I will give you my experience though.
I run an neq6 with about 14.5kgs on it. Guiding is via a zwo guidescope and asi120. Focal length of my scope is 925mm.
For a couple years my guiding ranged anywhere from 1rms (good night/seeing) to 3rms. Some subs were ok, some I threw away.
Getting a little more serious about the astro journey I went mono and had to make a decision on whether to buy a better mount as the 14.5kg I was carrying is around the imaging limit for the neq6 in standard form (IMO).
I was about to pull the pin on an EQ8 but decided instead to throw some money at the neq6 to see if I could improve it ($5.5K for the EQ8 made the decision pretty easy when i thought about it).
I replaced all bearings, did a belt mod and installed a Rowan Astronomy Zero RA backlash kit and re-greased it. I immediately had a significant improvement.
Guiding now with the exact same weight/setup I'm getting 0.2 rms (good night) to 0.7 rms. I'm easily doing 10 minute subs, have done 20 minutes also with no issue. I throw away 1 in 50 subs on average due to a significant error from unknown causes (significant error = the guide graph shoots off sideways for a few seconds then recovers). I dont bother with PEC.....I dont think I need it.
A note on the neq6 mount and modding it......it's not difficult, not in the slightest. I was really nervous at first and wasn't sure if I was making a massive mistake tackling the job myself however soon realised that beneath the pretty paint these things aren't high precision machines that require years of training or engineering experience to open. In all honesty they are made up of some pretty poorly cast housings held together with a few screws, nuts and bolts and you don't need specialist equipment to work with them. The worm and ring gear does need to be treated nicely but apart from that these things are rough pieces of mass produced Chinese gear.
I've worked on my own cars (sometimes very unsuccessfully) and tinkered with things through the years but I am by no means an engineer or mechanic.
From my experience it is well worth giving these things a tune up. It cost me under $1K (plus my time) to go from something that was pretty average to something that easily meets my needs and I think is on par with mounts worth many times more when it comes to tracking performance.
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