Well, I'm not a pro on excavators, but I can give you a base to start with. The digging at weird angles deal, ( I assume that you are talking about the boom moving off to one side or the other), Very handy for digging up close to a foundation for installing drainage, nice feature to have. As far as brands go: If you can not fix the machine yourself, then stick with a brand that you know where to find a dealer. For example, I have a Takeuchi TB25 (Hasn't been made in years) and there isn't a dealer with in 100 miles (sorry, I don't know what the metric conversion is... B-) And as a second issue, I bought an older machine, and some of the parts are no longer available. So even if you buy a machine in good working order, you still might need parts eventually, so figure that, and transport in. Grey market in the USA probably means something different than it does in Canada. But in the USA, as soon as a Kubota dealer gets wind that the machine you have was purchased and imported illegally, they won't even sell you parts. The work around is to find the closest non grey market model in your region, and order parts based on that.