A great review Luke.
I have one unit too but haven't been using it as much as I would have liked because of the beautiful weather we've had in Sydney. I used PHD to guide through a finder with a QHY5 then had the AO on its own loop with the lodestar on a guidestar for the sole purpose of correcting micro jumps. This way I kept the AO guide star always within the range of the AO FOV and didn't have to bump the mount, because I couldn't got ST4 direct to my old Gemini at the time. For this I used the SX software that is very basic as you've pointed out but it did the job just for that. I agree MAXIM can be a pain to use.