Third party stepper motor integration

Would you say you had a successful integration and would you recommend going down that route to connect a bunch of stepper motors?

Right now I am looking at using Modbus but I am running into some problems with a basic Modbus test setup. Modbus looks attractive in my case because each unit is independent. I am hoping to use Arduino platform to control each stepper motor once I figure out basics of Modbus communication.

Honestly I was hoping there would be straightforward tutorials somewhere for basic integration of common things such as stepper motors. If anyone has information to help me make some progress on this I appreciate it!