It definitely has room for improvement on setup, but as I was reading I was seeing tons and tons of folks saying these 7x lathes can really benefit from it and just put it back on if you want to do tapers.
That's the trouble with the internet....... You can find whatever you want to find. Good fixes to bad engineering. Good workarounds for all kinds of things. And mostly, you'll fnd a plethora of solutions that are looking for a problem to solve. And being the internet, those solutions, valid or otherwise, will range from no good, making huge money from "hits" generated just by the plain stupidness of the situation, right up to excellent, complete, thorough, and well thought out things that are actually improvements. And frankly, until you're an expert, it can be really hard to know the difference. Then you're headed down a rabbit hole because you're convinced you need "this", you're trying solutions on top of solutions to fix "this", you're preemptively fixing everything to address "this", and in all reality, the only thing you really wanted was "that", but you didn't know it until you were already underwater with "this"... It's a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole, and it's terribly easy to get lost in it.
Everyone with a small lathe (or any lathe probably) has their own expectations of it, their own hopes and dreams, their own end goals for it, their own projects, and their own specific interest of materials and work to complete with it. My advice is to start with what you've got. Set up "everything". Get all the bearings, gibs, slides, ways, and generally everything that moves so that it's as good as it can be. Don't go upgrade everything right out of the gate, just get them to working how they should. No upgrades are going to help (much) if you don't start right at the beginning, That is the original, as is lathe. Until that is made as good as it can be, anything you build or buy to bolt onto it will be effectvely bolted to a marshmallow. It won't deflect in and of it's self, but it's still gonna be all over the place.
After that's sorted out, do you still need (or want) to add a plinth in place of the compound? I dunno.... But with the carriage snugged up and properly fit, it'll at least be the most rigid place you can provide to put said plinth.
After that, and assuming you still want to do the plinth (which may well be the case), What does the lathe look like with the compound off? What tools and equipment to you have to work with. What needs to be done and how can you do it? Borrowing is fine, but not at the expense of your own needs, wants, and a good dose of forethought and creativity. What tool post is going onto it, and is that tool post necessary, or is it a necessary adaptation to the plinth? Must the plinth be square or "cuboid"? Is there a "round" shape that might do what you need done without being in the way? I have no idea, but a round one worked great in my situation.
OK, with out of the way, here's my thoughts on stuff.
Oversized chucks are quite possible, and do work just as you'd expect, as long as your expectations are reasonable. As the diameter increases in inches or millimeters (doesn't matter), the scale of them increases geometrically. They get thicker, heavier, bulkier, the jaws stick out further, the motor takes longer to spool up, the whole thing takes longer to turn off, you need to pay closer attention to setups, you need to space projects off of the face of the chuck more often.... I'd say that unless you had a NEED for a larger chuck, it's probably not going to be that great of an investment. It'll work of course, and maybe (probably) even work well, but the chuck you're going to be the happiest with is the one that fits the most of your work the best. How big is the block of metal you want to work with? What other projects do you have lined up? Bottom line, do you NEED bigger?
The plinth/compound elimination? How long does it take to change back and forth on one of those? I can tell you that did this, and can remove and install my compound in under a minute. Here's what happens though. When I need the plinth, there's no other option, so on it goes. It stays that way forever, because I don't care one way or the other. Then I want the compound, so I switch. And it stays that way because I don't care. There is one thing that I do that "requires" that plinth. 99 percent of my rigidity problems went away not with lathe upgrades, but rather with me becoming more and more proficient in grinding tool bits that keep the cutting effort and tool pressure at manageable levels.
