I’ve been developing an alternative to programs like Vectric/ArtCAM/Carveco that’s called PixelCNC. It can generate a variety of toolpaths (with more on the way!) and development is currently focused on fleshing out the compositing system for designing projects. Load images, vectors, models, and create text using fonts installed on your system. Position/scale/crop/rotate and blend images/models/text layers together to design your project. Generating shapes from vectors/paths, rail-sweeps, stroke-paths, are included for those who like to use a 2D-to-3D workflow. Relief carvings, halftones, V-carving/B-carving, horizontal roughing/finishing, and more are all possible with PixelCNC.
At the moment it’s released as early-access software and users are a bit on-their-own insofar as figuring out how to use it, which if you have any CAM experience is not that difficult. Development is focused on implementing all the features and functionality that are on the roadmap before we change gears to PR mode and then work instead on making videos and learning resources for it. Maximizing popularity and growing the user-base just isn’t the goal at the moment, but soon! We’ll be focusing on these things once PixelCNC reaches beta. At any rate I’m always ready and willing to answer any questions and listen to user feedback in the meantime for anybody who is inclined to be adventurous and help us to find bugs and make usability and feature suggestions 
In the meantime v1.40a is looking like it will be released within the next week or two (depending on how the holidays affect things) which includes single/double path-sweeping (aka “rail sweep” in Vectric Aspire) from cubic spline paths and quite a bit of UI usability enhancements and bugfixes. v1.40a will also feature the inclusion of a system which handles undo/redo of actions performed in the “canvas layer system” compositor.
To anybody reading this: If you’re not comfortable using software that’s still under active development I suggest you wait until PixelCNC has entered the beta phase of its development with all its major features/functionality complete and we’ve started putting out tutorials and project how-to demonstration videos.