FWIW Tackling the Hungry Robot project, I was getting pretty ugly cylinder walls.
After printing about 30 cylinders, I finally figured out what was causing all the cylinder wall terribleness (scarring/banding). For me it came down to 2 settings:
1. Compensate wall overlaps (must disable). This had only been enabled for inner wall overlaps, but I found several forums that pointed at this being sketchy.
2. Line width (Marlin recommends between 1.05 and 1.2 nozzle diameter). I upped mine from 0.4mm to 0.44mm and noticed instant improvement.
Things that were tried and had no effect:
* Outer walls before inner (leaving this disabled)
* Coasting on/off (leaving this enabled)
* Linear advance (leaving this at K=0.8 now that i went through all the trouble to calibrate)
* Outer wall flow (4% lower than flow)
* Z-seam (just dictates where the ugliness happened)
Perhaps relevant settings:
* Combing mode (not in skin)
* Retract before outer wall (enabled)
* Outer wall wipe distance (0.4mm)
David