My personal experience with two different robotic arms (< $500) and some additional research is the lack of high level software and libraries, which is quite crippling as it’s very complex to control.

If you’re not used to control theory and inverse dynamics it’s quite tricky to control it (especially at 0.25mm) and you’ll never get to actually use it to perform what you want.

You might have better luck with low-end industrial robots but the cheapest are $2500 and more.

(I’m similarly in the market if a product can prove me wrong, especially interested in something with some computer vision integration)