Dav, when I started using routers thirty odd years ago I made a small router table that clamped to my bench. Okay, without a split fence and with a smallish table it had some limitations, but overall it worked really well.
Then I went through a twenty year "wilderness" of building bigger and bigger router tables and getting worse and worse results. If you have a split fence the two halves must line up precisely, if you have an insert panel it has to be absolutely flush with the rest of the table, if you have a raising mechanism it has to be exactly perpendicular throughout it's travel. All of these things have a direct influence on the quality of the results and none of them come easy or cheap.
About ten years ago I started using the Festool CMS router table and very good it is too, but chuck in the cost of a sliding table, table extension, etc, and you could get a pretty nice spindle moulder for less.
I guess the message is either knock up a very basic and simple table...or budget serious money for the Festool solution. Both are sensible approaches. It's everything in between, where you're getting the flashy features without the German engineering, that's likely to disappoint!
Good luck.
