Or is this apples and oranges?
I'm getting used to my new slider. I made a F&F jig and really like the versatility and ease of making small rips and crosscuts. I've been watching a lot of slider videos, primarily Steve from Extreme Woodworker and Sam Blasco, and I'm in the process of building a home made parallel positioner to see if I like it before I shell out a couple hundred bucks for an Incra LS positioner.
Steve is a huge proponent of the F&F jig. He's lukewarm at best regarding the parallel positioner; in one video he mentions it in passing and says he rarely or never uses it. In another video featuring the parallel fence for ripping, his presentation in the video seems to suggest he would rather not even be discussing the parallel positioner, let alone doing a video on it....or maybe he just had bad indigestion that day.
On the other hand, Sam doesn't ever mention the F&F jig, doesn't seem to use one, and uses the parallel positioner quite a bit. For small and medium crosscuts he uses a short crosscut fence with an Incra 3000 head grafted onto the factory quadrant and multiple length stop setups.
It seems to me that the F&F jig is great at small to medium crosscuts and quick single cuts, small to medium rips, and multiple rips and crosscuts when used with the stop blocks. It also doesn't take up much room, and comes on and off the saw easily.
The parallel positioner seems to be more suited to rip cuts in medium to larger stock, and doesn't appear to have much if any utility for crosscuts. It has to be mounted and unmounted on the side track on the wagon, and stored somewhere when not in use. It also seems that I could more or less duplicate the functions of the parallel positioner by using both the short and long crosscut fences and their respective flip stocks to hold the stock once the stock had been crosscut to length, although the parallel fence would have more flexibility in terms of random lengths of stock.
There does seem to be some overlap in their functions, but is it worth the trouble (and expense) to build a high tech parallel fence setup given there are so many other ways to rip on a slider?