The conversation here is an interesting one and I need to be careful because I was quite a passionate and vocal detractor regarding the merits of D&T, or lack thereof. What I will say is that there is a lot of truth to the old saying, "You reap what you sow" and as a country we now see the result of de-skilling.
Back to the topic. I inspected the Advance lathe yesterday and bought it for a fair price. It is a dinky little thing, smaller than I'd expected but still a very nice little machine that will certainly perform some work adequately. It's condition is pleasantly quite good and it doesn't appear to have been knocked about or neglected. I can see that it does have the precision shortcomings I expected and as spoken of here in the comments. I can live with this. I'll learn how far to move the feeds to advance the tool point by 1/1000" and go from there. A problem appears to be the setting of the top slide to perform taper turning. I haven't had a good look at this yet.
It will need to have the chunky segmented belts replaced with appropriate V-belts since they are too big to be moved into the slowest spindle speed position. The motor position will need to be shifted in my setup as it presently interferes with the change gear assembly. It needs to be re-setup for complete functionality but the general condition certainly leads me to believe that I have a good base with which to proceed.
My main concern here now is that I'm on a slippery slope of the failings in this machine leading me to wanting a better one. :)