Thank you for the compliment!
I currently do not have my machine set up for rigid tapping. At some point, I may add an encoder to the spindle to make that work, but I have read that the servo encoder isn't sufficient for rigid tapping. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but I don't tap enough to invest the time to figuring that out. However, I am very pleased with the motor I have on the spindle. The difference between a real industrial servo motor and the hobby components I am used to is incredible. The motor and drive come with hundreds of pages of documentation (not exaggerating at all, literally several hundred pages) and the build quality is day and night. While I certainly couldn't justify purchasing one new for full price, if you can find one on the used market, I wouldn't hesitate to get it. The vibration problems I had were in the spindle, not the motor, but they have mostly been sorted out. I regularly run the spindle at 10,000 RPMs now and haven't had trouble with excessive heat. The vibration could be better, but it is completely usable at that speed.
LinuxCNC has a wizard to walk you through the configuration. I don't have a motion controller separate from the computer. I use an inexpensive parallel port breakout board to interface the PC and the machine. The set up was just telling the computer which pins were going to what, what step rate, microstepping, ballscrew pitch, max speeds, etc I was using. Next time I am using the machine, I will try to remember to make copies of the ini and hal files, though they are going to be pretty standard and the same as what you will get when go through the configuration wizard.
I am happy to answer any more questions if you have them!