I have always sent mine out to be longarm quilted by others - my husband purchased a Gammill for me this past summer and I have been doing some for charity and a couple of my own. I have two large quilts (scrappy) that are almost finished so we will see how that goes.
I never did well doing my own quilting on my personal machines and felt that with all the money and time I had spent in the making of the quilt - I didn't want to ruin them by not having a nice quilting job done on them. I have never been sorry about the money spent and it's been a lot over the years.
I have been quilting since 1998 and have made hundreds of quilts and spent hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars on longarm quilting. I am hoping to get good enough that I can do longarm quilting for others and make some of that money back.
Right now, I do my own and practice on charity quilts. Each quilt looks better than the last and I am actually getting pretty good at meandering - not so good at pantographs yet - they are very intimidating to me - need to practice more. I will be loading some muslin on my machine soon and will spend some time doing pantographs on it so I can get in some practice - I hate to do them on quilts that people will use. I want my charity quilts to look nice too.