NEO

Flair neo is just 13k. 26k is I believe is the standard or pro. One thing about flairs is, they offer the best espresso in their respective price range but comes with the cost of preheating and slow process in case pulling back to back shots.

Rare? The Flair Neo is available on Amazon for 120 bucks with overnight delivery where I live. If you mean machines with boilers, there are definitely fewer lever than E61 options but lever machines are dead simple to maintain. I completely disassembled and re-sealed my vintage LaPavoni with basic hand tools and OEM gaskets purchased from Amazon.

Is the flair neo available there? If so, it's pretty great 

What is your budget? The profitec pro800 and the flair neo are both lever machines but are completely different beasts.

A flair is great if you like straight espresso shots, but for milk drinks it seems like a very suboptimal solution.

If they just want to learn about coffee notes and tasting: Maybe something like the Flair Neo (a completely manual machine, as in you pull a lever to make the coffee) and a KinGrinder k6 will be just over 200 combined. A scale will still be needed, and you can't do frothing with this setup.

I went from a Flair Neo to Flair Classic. It’s great for me, I make 2 shots per day. It can be time consuming doing more, but you can make it work. I love it because it takes up less space. Looking back id start with a Classic over the Neo

The only machine in that price point to my knowledge that can do 9 bars is the Flair Neo.