Hey Andy,
So you went the Elite/Masso way too 
I would put it away from this unsuitable position. I have read that some people have even damaged it unintentionally with the movement of the spindle/dust boot assembly. Also the position is not compatible with an enclosure (I consider a machine enclosure as necessary). I don’t know if the cables lenghts allow to position it further away.
With the Masso, I would miss 1. the remote computer control capability 2. the gamepad 3. the open source operating system which allows to access and modify the system (see What the Elite’s Masso G3 cannot do or does not have). But the buildbotics-derived Onefinity Controller is far from being perfect, that is why I think Linuxcnc (the successor of NIST’s EMC² controller) is the only serious solution (however it is no CNC controller hardware, just a CNC controller software, so only for people who know how to build PCs and how to build a CNC computer system of their own).