Dear Jon,
As you might have expected, the responses are all over the lot depending upon the bias of the person who posts. Very few of us really have a broad experience of hearing many different expensive turntables in our home systems, which is the only way to make a judgement among them. So, everyone here is correct, and everyone here is also wrong. (Plus, Syntax was being facetious.) There are a few choices that cannot be "wrong", in my own equally insufficiently informed opinion: Walker, Saskia, etc, but most of those would actually exceed your generous budget for this purchase. Another candidate not mentioned should be "The Beat", a direct-drive turntable made by Steve Dobbins in Idaho. If you get an input here from "Thuchan", do take it seriously; he is one guy who HAS heard everything in his home system, although his system preference is very different from yours. By the way, while I like the SOTA Cosmos, I cannot agree that it has "no weaknesses". Suspended, belt-drive turntables have a characteristic sound that is not generally to my taste and includes unstable pitch, at times.