wanted: raised flooring for cheap

I've worked in both environments with raised floors vs ceiling ventilation/cabling. Either are fine it just depends what your real purpose is. From what I recall most of the raised floor environments I've been in were specifically for cooling mainframes and other server equipment, cabling happened to end up going there but that wasn't the purpose behind it. Plus you have to have to then be wary of your weight and distribution of systems with a raised floor which sorta kills the fun after a while. New systems need new bolts and mounts under them etc. The biggest pain was long power drops which were zigzagging between posts under the floor here from various previous moves that were "just enough" to get it where they needed next. Finally it took a long time pulling those out and rerunning them properly, let alone finding some with frayed wire exposed. Not a comforting experience after roughly handling them prior to that. Ceiling runs you end up with the same stuff after years of poor management. Cables thrown over and under certain other devices (lights, vents, mounts) that after a while are difficult to track what is where or work around it properly. The worst story I have is at a leased office we had which had a very large scorpion problem (they warned us every time we came there). You couldn't imagine the number of doughnut boxes and coffee cans they had full of their bodies in the break room (I guess they kept them out of boredom and as a complaint). Working anywhere in that building was unnerving but a coworker and I had to do a cable drop to the reception area. We're slowly pulling ceiling panels away, checking around a bit (my thinking was picturing some hive of the stupid things just waiting to be pissed off and found). We ran the cable but as my coworker was getting off the ladder he thought he felt something on his back (of course we spent most of our time there feeling like that). Either way, he threw his shirt off on the ground and was freaking out a bit when I found him but I didn't see anything. Mostly was just something we laughed about afterwards. So anyway, the discussion might be seemingly off topic but I think the point was debating if one was a better design than the other. Especially when cost is a concern. As far as finding the materials all I can think of are freecycle, craigslist free section, or habitat for humanity type stores if you're really set on doing all that work.