I have had the 8900 for a little over a month now. I found that my free motion stitches were much smaller using this machine than my old Viking. I don't know whether it was the speed of the machine, how I was moving the fabric or what but I couldn't seem to make the stitches larger. I also had trouble following the lines on the circular quilting foot so pretty much stuck with the closed toe one. When I was using my older Viking machine to FMQ I used an open toe embroidery foot rather than the pouncing darning foot. I found that very distracting to use. One thing I haven't tried yet is to set my speed on the Janome to very low to see if that will help in the stitch length as my movement may be more in line with the speed of the machine. I didn't have any trouble with it catching on seams but had to loosen my foot quite a bit to get the material in general to move freely.