I think the one point that hasn't been addressed here is that it is very hard to learn to FMQ when you're struggling with a large quilt on a machine with a small throat. I'm still a "Newbie" at FMQ, and I was so exasperated after my last large quilting adventure, that I gave up on doing whole quilts on my machine. And it's not my machine, it's me. I have a beautiful Janome MC9700 that runs like a dream. It just has a relatively small harp. My solution was to turn to quilting in pieces. Kind of the "quilt as you go" style. You can actually break apart almost any quilt, at least into fourths, quilt each fourth, and then put them together without much trouble.
Is this a great long term solution? No, of course not. But it will work until I'm really secure with my FMQ and can deal with doing it in a small space instead of needing to have a bigger space to see what I'm doing. Then I can go back to "squishing the quilt" and whole quilt quilting again. It's a learning curve.
Somewhere down the road, perhaps I'll get good enough to justify buying a quilting machine. It means I'd have to be good enough to quilt other people's quilts too, because that's what I'd have to do to help pay for it, and that means less time for my own quilting. It's always a trade off. Or maybe by then they'll make a machine I can afford that has a bigger harp. Wouldn't that be wonderful!