Congrats on your new scope Phil, that's quite an ordeal you've been through
and now for more rain
I've had the AVX since it first came out and it's a nice little mount for the price. The trick to good gotos is to do the 2-star alignment and answer yes when it suggests adding calibration stars. The more you add (up to 4), the more accurate the gotos will be. After a 2+4, I find it will stick the object in the FOV with a rough polar alignment, meaning just plonked down pointing in more or less the right direction
ideally though, get it as close to true south as you can, but don't waste any time just for visual use.
One thing to check though is the firmware version...if you want to subsequently run the All-star polar alignment routine you need to be running the latest firmware which includes fixes for the southern hemisphere, otherwise it throws up meaningless values.
The other night I was out fooling around with mine waiting for Sagittarius to rise and after one iteration of the 2+4 star followed by polar alignment I was getting 30 second exposures 50% of the time with the camera attached to my C8...it's not a bad little mount