Let him buy some steppers and try them out
The worst thing about steppers is people expecting them to keep track of position by the number of steps they were commanded to move. If you have a controller that will keep cranking out pulses until the thing is where it is supposed to be, then there should not be a whole lot wrong with them, I suppose.
But, then you have to buy an encoder, which is usually part of a servo system and can account for $300 to $500 worth of the cost, per axis.