I'll act as a bump here
firstly, it's the same mount as the Skywathcer one, so whatever you read about one, applies to the other. I've seen one, once, but I read about stuff like my life depends on it. I may well be dead wrong with the following, though
I don't have one, but it's a mount that can take a good amount of weight, so will be fine for getting going and then up to and perhaps beyond a1000mm focal length if you want to at some point.
It's a heavy thing, but I don't think it would be much of a pain for taking in and out of the house/garage often if you're in good health. The head would be under 20kg I suppose. A whole bunch of amazing images using big newts have been taken on neq6 mounts.
Reasons you'd skip it for the neq6r? As far as I know it has no PEC and is not belt driven. Belt modification is a piece of cake, I'm not sure how PEC plays out with phd2 guiding, if it can be compensated for. It's a whole lot cheaper than the newer neq6r, even with a belt mod factored in. New neq6r has direct USB input too, but an eqdirect cable is another small cost that will be quickly forgotten.
I don't see anything about it that would make it better or worse for setting up compared to similar mounts, so don't worry about that.
I don't think about having astro stuff forever. A mount like that as a first mount would, I think, satisfy for a long while. In terms of quality, be prepared for the possibility of it not being a beautifully tuned piece of clockwork, but also know that you can probably tinker with it and make it much better
Like I said up front, feel free to treat this as a long winded bump up the order
you probably have all of that info under the hood already.