Squeak,
I agree with you on most of your points.
Here is what I think after 5 years playing with inexpensive electronic keyboards:

1) The first thing a user needs to grow is more polyphony. Insufficient Polyphony is probably the most obvious disadvantage of inexpensive keyboards. As you know I am into composing music. At first my arrangements were pretty simple. As I got used to my DGX-305 I began composing songs with more complex arrangments. In the example I mentioned above, it is a rock'n'roll song. When I hit three notes on the vibraphone, the "rain" voice drops out and the effect is lost. So I have to reduce harmony-fill notes.

2) Quality of voices. In my opinion, 30 very good quality voices is better than 15 very good and 400 bad to worse. However, a beginner user will show off when they say their keyboard has n hundreds of sounds.

3) I didn't mentioned the issue with the quality of the keys - In my opinion lightweight keys should be the minimum requirement to a keyboard.

Voice editing and drawbar organ sounds interesting

BUT

On the other hand, Imagine the novice user, a person who have never touched an electronic keyboard. If he/she got an entry level keyboard, they could get confused by some of of the features. If you visited the Yahoo DGX group forum, you could meet with many people who have trouble to understand the basic operation of the keyboard.

To summarize: As I said in another topic "L'apetit vien an manganeant" - Appetite comes as you eat. I outgrew each of my keyboards in a year and a half. That is the time Yamaha need to deliver the next DGX generation. Unfortunately, I don't feel like upgrading because of what I said in points 1) and 2)

Good for them. This proves that their interest in keyboard has increased.

Squeak, If I were you I'd count the keyboards as photo-cameras. If you get into taking photos you will need a better camera. You can hardly sell a semi-professional DSLR camera to a person who has never touched a camera.

Best regards,
George