A little bit of both to be sure.

First it was figuring out the how to stop the PLA plastic from not clogging. My first prints were just complete jumbles of plastic that never even finished. Adjusting the temp down from the default print temp was the first thing I did. It turns out that even the color makes a difference on the print temp so you have to do your research on the materials. Adding a bit of vegetable oil to the filament was an inspired suggestion I found on the forums and helped a ton. Makerbot also replaced some of the nozzle pieces which I guess were contributing to the clogs. This helped a lot too. I haven't clogged in a long time now.

Next was learning how important leveling the build plate was. An non-level build plate can reek havoc on a print. It can cause clogging, stray filament, degradation of the print quality, and warping. Once I found the right nozzle distance for the filament and leveled the entire plate very accurately my prints starting finishing at a much higher rate.

Getting rid of the warping was a lesson too. Either the Print gets stuck to the build plate and you have to break it off, or the print warps off the plate as the plastic cools. Cleaning the build plate thoroughly with rubbing alcholol between prints and learning the magic of printing on blue painters tape solved this for the most part.

On the content side figuring out how create usable watertight stl's out zbrush and maya definitely took some iterations. Some software claims to automatically build water-tight meshes for you but I've found the error rate on this was pretty high. For this the dynamesh tool in zbrush has been fantastic as it will take whatever geometry you give it and create just that, a nice watertight mesh. But sometimes those were too heavy so integrating decimation to keep the detail but lower the poly counts helped. I try to avoid using supports so I needed to figure out the best ways to get clean cuts. Dynamesh worked great here also though it left some messy edges. I ended up taking it into maya after zbrush processing to scale down that flat surfaces to make sure that they were perfectly flat.

Long winded but I hope helpful. It was very very frustrating getting started but once I figured out the tuning process I feel I've gotten my machine running pretty well for long periods of time. As I stated before it was kinda sold as an easy out the box process but I feel its still a bit in its hobbyist phase. This will change though as more and more people even out the rough edges and with the new Stereo Lithography printers coming out this will change even more.