Amp recommendation -- McIntosh, Luxman, Yamaha

I'm not in a position to comment on SQ, but the Rotel RA1592MKII might be of interest.  It lacks MC the gain stage but hits all your other desiderata.  The MKII has audio tweaks by Ken Ishiwata, a respected Japanese audio guru, so it may not be misplaced in the company of the other amps.  

crustycoot, thanks for the tip.

Elliott, thanks for the thoughtful response, those are great points. I'll comment to them in case someone goes through a similar decision in the future....

The A/B capability for me is currently more for short term swapping and evaluation, so it is convenient when its in the same unit. That said, I've got that in my older Sansuis in case the feature is missing.

Good point about idle speakers. The system is in a dedicated listening room which is fairly treated with Gik Acoustics panels. Not sure if that helps with idle speakers or not.

Phono: 
I currently have AT VM540ML, Nagaoka MP-200 MM carts and AT OC9-XEN MC cart. The default MM/MC loading of the Luxman match these fairly well.
As opposed to the past, I'm not looking to squeeze every last bit of performance but to simplify, so it helps that a single unit can accommodate all of them.
Otherwise, I really like DIY for phono stages and have built a few, the Pass Labs Pearl 2 being my favorite. I've also got Cinemag transformers for building a SUT, which I could always incorporate in the future.

If there is unit out there that is a much better engineered and built product than the Luxman and lacks one of the other features mentioned above, I would consider it, but otherwise it sounds like the Luxman is a solid stereo unit that also happens to have the additional features that are nice to have.

you won't go wrong buying a modern luxman... you will certainly pay up for it, but most feel it is money well spent

McIntosh!

In the future I'll connect a lower powered tube power amp and driveit from the pre-outs.

It seems a bit of a waste to me to get this nice an integrated and then just use it as a preamp. Is the plan to flip the integrated for a good preamp at this stage?