I know this thread is a bit old but I want to rant a little about my experience with the 2T Prusa XL. Hopefully this helps your decision a bit.

First off if you're gonna buy it, build it yourself. 100% anecdotal but the people I've seen with crashing tool heads and major issues all have pre-assembled units. Maybe something happens to the frame in shipping, but my semi-assembled unit hasn't had any tool crashes or serious flaws... yet

Secondly, the price is much higher than the website tells you. Prusa doesn't secretly overcharge you, but they also don't include many things I feel should be at this price point. The lack of enclosure being the most egregious to me, but I also would like a camera or at least support to add one. I've had to spend an additional few hundred dollars getting more nozzles (seriously, fuck 0.4mm on a 360³ build plate), an enclosure, and even another peice of extruded aluminum so this thing doesm't rattle itself to pieces. It definitely feels more like a 'first gen' product more than anything I've had from Prusa in the past, but I do think the platform has a ton of potential.

So far performance has been good, not great like I expected out of Prusa. Mainly; it's a bit slow for a coreXY, and I've had some adhesion problems even with pla on a textured plate. I think I solved the adhesion issue with an enclosure, it's in my garage so the temperature varies a ton. Still, keep in mind since they do not even give you the option to buy an enclosed XL.

Multi color and material has been where this printer really starts to shine, I would argue that the single tool head isn't even worth producing. The filament waste is negligible and tool changes add very little time to the print (about 12 minutes per 100 changes), although I have had some issues with z shift after a tool change. It's impressive to watch it change extruders effortlessly, and probably the only part of this printer that I would say was worth the price.

If I had to do it all over again I probably would have just cancelled my pre-order. Seeing printers like the peopoly magneto at a similar price really drives home how long this printer was delayed. It almost feels outdated upon arrival, especially since the XL still has a lot of software features missing.

TL;DR it's a good printer, but not as good as I expected out of Prusa. Compared to truly state of the art printers it seems overpriced, and unless you plan on exclusively printing multi-color or material you will be better served by other products.

There is another option you haven't explored. 3dChameleon

This allows you to turn any machine into a 4 material capable printer. It is not plug-and-play, but if you already have a printer it's cheaper than getting a whole dedicated machine ($180).

It can do flexibles too, which I didnt expect it to be able to do. Working on making phone cases with TPU inside and PLA outside.

There is an update coming in April that will make it way easier to configure, with sensor-less detection of filament position.

If you want something that works perfectly out of the box I'd go with A1 combo from Bambu Labs though. The Chameleon takes a little tinkering to get working

If you don't mind the closed platform, you can also get the Bambu labs A1 mini + AMS Lite for around that price. From what I've heard, it works really well, albeit a bit wasteful when switching filaments due to the purging it does.

I think you are getting what you want confused here and may be blinded to your best option with your bad experience. IDEX machines are primarily used for printing 2 parts at the same time. The Prusa XL is a multi-tool tool changer machine that only prints with one head at a time which is a different type of printer.

If you want cheap and reliable multi-colour printing you are best off going with a Bambu Labs machine. An A1 and AMS-Lite is pretty reasonable and despite being single nozzles the machines are pretty reliable (I have an P1S + AMS and it works great for multi-colour prints).

Good machines have gotten cheaper, but random cheap printer are still very hit or miss. For a consumer printer I wouldn't look much further than Bambu or Prusa these days depending on what you want. Cheaper printers are too risky, and more expensive printers don't really gain you anything.

I'm not very familiar with the lower end of index printers. Bambu does exist and seems to work well, but have no support for multimaterial flexibles, and I'm not a fan of the closed nature of their printers.

There are a few other solutions for single toolhead mmus, such as the prusa mmus and the ercf, but those have the problems you mentioned as well.

The only multi toolhead solutions I know of are on the high to very high end (Prusa XL, Voron Phoenix, and there are some projects for toolchangers and idex for the Voron 2.4).

I have been eyeing on the Sovol SV04 it's a IDEX machine. It looks like a solid choice with good reviews.