dialing in the print

Some of the issues you're seeing are what we are trying to address in the improving print quality thread.

First thing you need to address is first layer adhesion. This is going to be overcome by trying out a few different fixes. First in the surface that you use. If you don't have the flexible base you need to get something that you can print on that is flat. If you use glass you'll need some sort of adhesion helper like a coating from a glue stick or hairspray. You can also use painters tape.

Next you should verify the z-offset height. It looks like your first layer is pretty good looking from what I can tell in your pictures. I don't think you should go about messing with this just yet. That said, you should look at how the extrusion is occurring. Does the line look like a cylinder laying on the bed? This would mean the nozzle is too far away and the extruded filament is essentially just "resting" on the bed. If the nozzle was too close you'd see a fat line that was smeared out to either side of the nozzle. You want to be in between these two.

You can also look at bed temperature. You said you didn't mess with settings in Cura yet. I think for the Makertech PLA+ that auto selects it sets a bed temperature to 50C. (You have a heated bed, correct?) I actually start mine higher than this. There are two temperatures you can set, a bed temp and an initial layer bed temp. I like to set mine a little higher 55 or 60 for the first layer. If you go to high you'll get an effect called "elephant's foot" where the heat of the bed causes the initial layers to mush out.

One thing I'll point out is that my first cube looked very similar. I thought it was over-extruding. I pulled the flow back to 80 (use Tune -> Flow Rate during a print) to see if that helped. It did a little.

The improving quality thread is a little long now so it's kind of hard to see where I started and how I was attempting to address some of the issues. The first thing I was trying to accomplish was to make the layer lines uniform in the z-axis. While watching a print I noticed that there was a lot of wobble to the z-axis. This lead me to get a new metal coupler. This improved, but didn't help everything. I next tried a bearing support at the top. This also helped some, but I think started magnifying the issues in the guide system. I've now greased, with silicone grease, the contact areas, and added the additional z support that @Gareth Owen designed.

At the moment I've kind of tabled the project as I needed to clean out the desk in the office for one of my girls to use when school starts back up. Hopefully someone will have that eureka moment and we can all have a printer that functions much more nicely.