You said
"The PK3 is almost double the price of my Junebug. I've not used one and I'm biased towards my kits so I can't give you an unbiased opinion.
The Junebug was designed as a Student / Experimenter / Hobbiest tool as it has a "lite" version of the PK2 (non programmable VDD or built in EEPROM)
it's far and away our most popular kit and is MPLAB compatible.
I own an ICD2, PICkt 2, PICStart+ and it's my Junebug I use the most."
What is the lite version of the PK2 mean? Does the internal NVM allow this to store a program and reprogram modules standalone?
If i was running MPLAB, is there any perceivable difference?
I will be using the 16F877 to proto my projects then moving to the optimum version of micro.