I have been hung up on what software to use for my rotary axis for weeks now.  It is getting very frustrating. I have tried every software on my list twice now and none of them are winners so far.  I feel like somewhere out there is a great piece of software and I just can't find it.  Here is a breakdown of what I have found so far.

• GrblGru - This has soo much promise but somehow it falls short.  It is clear from videos online that older versions of this software can get the job done but I can't get the latest version of the software to work.  I get something close to a rotary carving but it comes out all distorted.  I have tried to dig up older versions of this software but with no luck so far.
• SketchUCam -  This is well out of date and only works with old versions of sketchup.  I only gave this a half hearted attempt, but I could not work anything out at all with it.  It is a poor long term solution being that it has not had serious work done on it for years and it is unlikely to move forward ever.
• FreeCAD+path - This is probably the most frustrating of the bunch.  All the pieces are there and yet it does not work at all.  As a cad program it is annoying, everything that Fusion360 does so simply is tedious in FreeCAD.  Trying to use path for 2D cutting is frustrating, but functional.  However I was unable to make the rotary support work at all.  I need to revisit this again but I have a feeling the solution is to install some unsupported patches to get it working.  It should be a good solution in 2-3 years when they finally get path all sorted out.
• Grbl-Plotter - I actually like this one a lot, however it is laser only.  If you don't already have LightBurn then this is a good alternative.
• G-Code Ripper - I have had the most luck with this one.  It appears to properly wrap a 2D carve around a cylinder.  However when I tried to load the resulting gcode into UGS it does not look like it is correctly driving the A axis but rather messing with the Y axis.  I need to sit down at the machine and see if UGS is just rendering the moves wrong or if G-Code Ripper is not generating the right code.
• CNC Wrapper -  There is no way to get your hands on this, and looking at the wayback machine it seems to have been out of circulation for several years now.  I found an old version from a dodgy website and tried to run it but it is not functional.  This is a more polished version of G-Code Ripper in theory.
• D2nc -  I could not work out how to use this to wrap gcode, maybe I'm just not smart enough.  It looks like a nice enough tool for tweaking gcode, although it is a bit pricy for what it appears to do.
• CamBam -  I spent some time looking into this and find it to be a frustrating tool.  I have looked into it previously when I was investigating cad packages.  It does not actually have rotary support built into it.  There are some very old plugins out there that can unwrap 3D models and wrap 2D gcode onto a cylinder, much like G-Code Ripper.  There is some potential for this to work, but I spent several hours on it and did not make much progress.  Still it is worth another look.
• DeskProto -  This one works great, it is amazing how easily it is to work with. It is just what I'm looking for.  However the demo version is completely crippled and can not generate functional gcode so I can't test the results.  And it cost almost as much as my whole machine for a tool that is not as nice as Fusion360 (but still nice) so it is hard to justify the cost just for the occasional rotary work.  If I do pony up money it will probably be on this.  If it was $80 I would have picked it up already but for almost $300 I could get myself a better laser or a table saw.
• vCarve Desktop - This appears to have rotary support but when I grabbed the free version I could not get it to work.  I followed there guides but the rotary modules are not installed or activated.  I even went all in and downloaded Aspire but it also was missing the rotary modules.  This could be user error but I went over there documentation several times and did not see a way around it.  I suspect the rotary support is just not enabled on the demo.  vCarve is like CamBam, I find it very counter intuitive to work with, I much preferer Fusion360.  However plenty of people manage to make it work so it is probably just that I'm not comfortable with it yet.  Again the cost is very high for the desktop version, for the full Aspire it is crazy expensive.
• Fusion360 - This looks great, but the rotary support is disabled.  I know in my heart that this can do everything I want however the cost is just way too far out there.  $500 a year for rotary support is probably nothing for a commercial shop, but for hobby work that is close to my annual budget for all my projects.  My wife is a teacher and I have a kid in highschool and college.  I may abuse one of there emails to get a student license.  However that is only a temporary solution, eventually they will graduate and I will need to pay for it or loose rotary support.  Besides this offends my sense of justice, somewhere out there is a good piece of software that supports a rotary attachment that is priced for the hobby market.

I'm not sure how many of my issues are user error or how many of them are just poor pickings.  I'm a computer developer by trade so I consider myself a reasonably qualified computer user, but still I'm having no luck at all with any of these packages.

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Edit: I found another wrapper tool called GCODE Wrapper that is very similar to G-Code Ripper but it only wraps gcode without the other features.  The output from it looks just like the output from G-Code Ripper so I suspect that UGS is at fault for the code looking wrong.  

It gives me some hope that one or the other can be made to work.  Both are compromises, you cant directly model a part and turn it into gcode, you have to find a way to unwrap the 3D model first.  It is better than nothing but it is not full 4th axis support.