Survey: HiFi System Priorities

Con’t:

Avoid speakers difficult to drive. Select amplification that mates well with speakers. Select source devices with understanding of gain and impedance issues across system. 

"Survey" is way too complicated for someone ready to "step up".

Take them to a local shop to see/feel and hear things before anything. Do they know what a proper setup sounds like? If not, how can they be convinced it worth the expense to determine a budget?

Waste of time.

I'd advise against overspending on speakers before getting the upstream sources to a reasonable level. As an extreme example, adding great speakers to a Sonos system would even more clearly reveal the shortcomings of the sound quality coming from the Sonos. I see the speakers as a window into the rest of a system.

+1 to the suggestion from @tablejockey to go listen before deciding priorities. A good shop will know how to put together a system that sounds good and your friend can hear the effect of spending more or less on "better" or "worse" components for different parts of the system.

No system is "perfect" right off the bat, but a good shop can provide a good starting point that your friend can modify over time to his preferences.

For your survey, I would suggest reducing the number of categories as someone who drafts surveys in my day job. There are too many categories to sort easily. I might suggest:

Source
Amplification
Speakers
Speaker cables
Interconnect cables
Acoustic room treatment

Those choices alone will generate a wide range of responses. And I agree with @millercarbon that a survey is probably not the right way to answer your friend's question. Your survey results will just likely show that there is a divide between the speaker-first people and the source-first people, while the "truth" probably lies somewhere in between the philosophies of the two groups. As I mentioned above, listening is the only way for your friend to figure out what is the "truth" for him in terms of what part of the system to emphasize.