I note that this is an old thread, but just signed up and figure I might as well throw in my two bits.
Five bucks for the KitchenAid pasta set?! You killed with that one - I thought I did well at $24 in the thrift shop (okay, I did... it's a $250 set new). I really like mine, and I don't have any problem with the height. We've mostly used it for rolling the noodle sheets for ravioli, not so much the cutters, but they work fine too.
Their ravioli attachment looks like the stupidest idea yet, though: it doesn't take power from the mixer - you have to crank it. The mixer just serves as a stand (in this case way too high, I think), so I think you'd really have to be an idiot to spend another $250 or so on it.
Since gadzooks mentioned the grinder/stuffer... I finally got one of those as well. Bought a Cuisinart grinder/stuffer (I don't have a Cuisinart mixer) at the thrift shop for $5, sold it on kijiji for $50, and gave the $50 to someone else on kijiji a couple of weeks later for the KitchenAid set. To date I've only used it once for making some pork sausage, and it didn't work well. The cutter blade and plate are light and cheap, unlike the heavy-duty cast and machined cutters and plates typical of old crank grinders, and it wasn't good at feeding the fairly stringy raw pork cut I was using. Will have to work with it some more, but so far I'm not impressed and happy I only spent a fiver on it.