Somewhere on this forum there is a sub section that seems to be exclusively used by a fellow whose principal activity is doing something very similar to what you are describing.I have a feeling he spent a lot more than $1500 to get there.My experience with digitised data is limited to taking points from a Proline digitiser and working with them to create CAD entities for machining and it worked well.The machine could output a .dxf file and by using a range of techniques to create the right kind of CAD entities passing through those points and joining/trimming them an outline was arrived at.I used Rhino for this and it does get under your price tag.I am a bit surprised none of your software will do anything useful since it isn't so far from using a calibrated mouse to generate points and then you need to create the outlines to connect them.Have you tried any online forums for each of those specific pieces of software?There has to be a fair chance that somebody will know of a $65 plug-in that could help.