AIex

I've spent the past ~10 months building RichBoyJhae's AT-AT, the instructions for which are sold on brickvault's webstore. It's cost me several hundred dollars and a lot of time to get all of the pieces, and I'm buying them used for the most part. I would suggest getting as many parts as possible through the Bricks and Pieces shop on Lego's website, though they won't have everything you need it is often more affordable than bricklink, especially shipping, and also means all the parts you order through there are brand new. That said, you'll inevitably have to order some of your parts through bricklink, these custom models from what I've seen usually take advantage of parts that are no longer produced or in circulation.

given the choice, I'd pick brickvault's models any day of the week. That said, there are a lot of factors to consider. With the brickvault models you pay for the instructions before you even start buying parts, all of which has to be done manually through bricklink and will inevitably take time. You also spend a lot more money as those models are made up of quite a lot more parts than Lego's sets, and some of which are no longer in production. If money and time are not of the essence, I would definitely go with brickvault's models, but lego's sets are definitely a more inexpensive and convenient route.

I hope so, would be extremely useful for my custom walkers

What would they possibly print on Veers' arms, lol. These sets seem to cover all the eras nicely, much like the summer wave last year. Hopefully we at least see this sort of diversity

while I highly doubt the $800 set is an AT-AT, richboyjhae's minifig scale model features an interior and some motor functions while only being around 6000 pieces, so it's definitely possible

perhaps a fig-scaled sail barge?

I don't suppose the Executor counts?