Taste Note: Niche is by no means a "bad grinder". its solid and does what it's suppose to do well, which is traditional tasting espresso.
however sculptor is able to bring out more clarity and fruitness, if that's what you are looking for in your coffee / beans.
Operational noise: Sculptor win hands down. Niche is just too loud for me, heck even DF64's noise sounds less "atas" even when its pretty "quiet"
Workflow: Niche will have some retention and its annoying having to "knock" on the grinder or pump the third-party add-on bellow, causes a mess and just doesn't sit right for me.
The knocker on Sculptor on the other hand is just classy. Spin-Spin-Tick-Tack and its done, not to mention the knocking sound is rather pleasing.
Ease of Maintenance: Niche or DF tends to get left over retention around the chute area especially and also on the blade, even if you do RDT (spraying your beans before grinding), so you would have to open it up frequently to clear out the chute.
For Sculptor, you will get the RDT retention on the blade only if u spray alot of water on the beans - although i can say that the Sculptor needs no RDT and performs excellent without any additional step, which is a big plus for me personally.
Cleaning: No comments for Sculptor as i've not done any cleaning yet, still working perfectly. Although i've opened it up to check the burrs for retention etc and can say that its relatively easy, just need the hex key.
Niche, easy to remove and clean so not much of an issue too.
Build Quality: Sculptor win hands down. Niche has this plasticky feel cos it is made of plastic.
Whereas if you actually manage to hold the sculptor, the housing just feels so solid and heavy. I dare say that you won't believe its actually below $1.5k if no one told you about the price - feels like those grinder which can be sold around 2-3k price range IMHO.
However side note that the above only holds true for 078S. There has been reviews that the 064/064S doesnt feel as "premium", build quality or material wise, and its much lighter thus doesn't feel as "premium".
Also, 064S will have stalling issues when you grind lighter beans at the lower RPM range so take note of this and go for the 078S if you plan to do light roast. However!! if you turn up the RPM, 064S is still able to handle light roasted beans.
Hope this helps!
P.S. iirc i saw that Cheerful Goat does some roadshows around shopping malls and some of the larger roadshows, they do actually display the Sculptor grinders for you to have some hands-on. not sure if there are still doing these roadshows but you can talk to them to find out i guess?
They are the official Timemore distributor in SG, and my kickstarter's Sculptor is delivered by them.
