What is Reddit's opinion of Meade Instruments 07177-02 Super Plossl 1.25-Inch-40-Millimeter Eyepiece?

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Awesome! I also got a deal on craigslist for mine. Make sure to play with the scope a bit before you buy too much stuff! It'll be obvious what isn't working well for you after a night or two and then you can invest some more money. You might even want to see if there is a local astronomy club. They usually have star parties you can go to and get some in person help. The members will often let you borrow gear before you actually buy it.

When I first turned mine on, there was a bit of a scare when the Autostar seemed to run away while doing the polar alignment routine. In the end, I just needed to calibrate the motors. The Autostar manual has the directions. I learned it is important to run the motor calibration routine whenever the power source changes, this includes when the batteries start to droop as they run down. Occasionally the Autostar starts doing weird things and this usually solves it. The most common one I see is you push the button to move the telescope left and it moves, then moves back right once you let go. Re-calibrate and it stops doing this. Worse case, there is an Autostar 'reset' function which will hopefully clear out any bad mojo...

These telescopes have a large F-stop number (13 something I think), so to see larger objects in the sky (Moon, M31, etc) and to make it easier to find things you will want an eyepiece with as big a focal length as possible. The 32 and 40mm plossl are the longest 1 1/4 eyepieces I could find. Not necessarily recommending this exact one, but something like is should give you good results (though the price is pretty reasonable):

http://www.amazon.com/Meade-Instruments-07177-02-1-25-Inch-40-Millimeter/dp/B000237C92

I found that eyepieces with a focal length much less than 18-20mm will bump against the limit of the scope optics and the seeing conditions pretty quick. I wouldn't bother with a barlow for this reason.

I agree with another commenter that the electronic focuser is helpful, though you can get by without it for a while. What I really found lacking was the finderscope, especially when you are looking at something high in the sky. You might want to look into a 1x finder. This one is my favorite:

http://scopestuff.com/ss_rqf2.htm

Though you will have to attach it to the ETX with double sided tape, which I'm not a fan of, they do work quite well and you really need a decent finder while doing the Autostar alignment procedure.

And finally, anything you could ever want to know is on this site, probably more than you ever need to know:

http://www.weasner.com/etx/menu.html