CD"S

Personally I rip all my CDs to FLAC.  I have about 8K titles and having them out was a real pain.  Now they are all in storage (wallets) and live on my server.  I use Roon to stream to a Lumin X1 that I very much like.  When I buy a CD (rare these days) I rip it with an Iomega CDROM.  I use Yate for tagging.  The sound is glorious.  Not sure why anyone would use a builtin DAC.  

That said, I mostly purchase DSDs these days (512!!), or LPs.

CDs are cheaper than ever right now so it is a great time to invest. Soon mass scale manufacturing will end and the prices on the used market will increase. 

In case you ever think of streaming: CDs are better than streaming since you can choose which mastering to buy and listen to.  Streaming services generally have the most recent mastering which is mastered loud with reduced dynamics and more compression (to sound better on earbuds and Bluetooth speakers). A lot of good audio equipment will sound better with earlier mastering when the CD sounded a lot closer to the master tape.  By buying second hand CDs you can easily get these earlier versions of the albums. Not so with streaming 

I moved back into 2-channel music about 3 years, and am absolutely loving it. SACD is my preferred source, with Vinyl and then Redbook CD's in succession. I upgraded to the Yamaha S-2100 player, which I think features the same Transport as the S-3000. It produces fabulous sound, and has been completely reliable.

Enjoy!

IMO, it's more about you as a person than it is anything else.  If you're the type that enjoys fooling around with computers, finding the right ripping format and program, organizing tracks, etc, etc - go for the hard drive. 
But if popping in a CD and listening is more your speed, then get a player. Never heard the Yamaha, but you should be able to get something pretty decent in your price range.  I think one of the dealers was blowing out the Naim CD5x with a flatcap for something like you want to spend.  It is very good IMO.  

I like it simple, put it in the CD player, put it on the turntable. I can’t speak to streaming as I don’t. I do copy CDs to my desktop and burn 80 great minutes of custom CDs, for example female vocals, soul, rock, fusion, acoustic jazz, etc. I would invest in a new CD player or a Separate DAC and transport. I listen to 98% vinyl at home but CDs in my car. CDs get a bad rap in mainstream media. Older music lovers like me grew up on vinyl, bought lots of records, then were forced to buy lots of CDs cause we could not get new music by artist we liked on vinyl. Many people have great CD collections of super music. I can’t even get on vinyl now some music I have on CD as the artists were not big sellers so they don’t re-release. Looking through my CDs there was some good, well recorded, kinda jazz music on these labels. Some of these will never be on vinyl, but Some of these artist are adventurous.