Glad to see you are getting things slowly worked out. Sounds like you were having some settings issues that you may have overlooked. This is why everyone stresses DO ONE AXIS AT A TIME. It really helps with troubleshooting. Once you have one axis working you can duplicate the drive settings and wizard setting for the next axis and so on.
As for the home and limit switches, Acorn CAN handle everything. No need for any manual override switches. Your home switches will also function as limit switches and the max travel switches are optional. They really are not needed unless you you have trust issues. My soft limits have never let me down.
HomeAll is used when you series your switches to one input. It is used for homing all three axis on one input.
HomeLimit can be assigned to each axis but requires and individual input.
Soft limits work if the machine and drives are configured properly. If its an open loop machine, and you loose steps, then they won't work accurately. If an axis it's a hard stop, open loop steppers will stall. At which point you have to re-home the machine. With the cost of closed loop steppers coming down, I rarely use open loop steppers any more.
Reminder, for support please follow this post: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=383
We can't "SEE" what you see...
Mesa, AZ
Solved: Solved take 2: So I wanted to share my experience. I don't CNC very often because of time contraints.
The final issue was: ....I did not have resistors on each signal feeding the drives as shown in the installation software. Thus, my drives would error and stop while Acorn continued to provide signal and show axis movements. This also explained the jogging issues.
Resistors added, I've been using my machine without issue.
My soft limits have never let me down.