A couple of things bother me here. First, your constraints about speaker placement. Given the number of dollars you already have invested and the additional dollars you are prepared to invest, I'd strongly urge you to be more flexible about speaker placement. Please forgive me if I sound condescending--truly I do not mean to be--but it is a measure of your inexperience that you are prepared to say, "They have to be placed RIGHT HERE and no place else." It comes down to how badly you want good sound. In the interest of optimum speaker placement, I have seen speakers placed in traffic flow patterns so that everyone had to learn to step around them, etc. In my current situation, one of my speakers extends halfway into a doorway--AND the door is covered with ugly Sonex. Inconvenient as hell but I paid $15K for the speakers and I'm sure gonna put them where they sound best.
Speaker placement is absolutely CRITICAL to getting what you say you want. Whether it is a matter of convenience, aesthetics, SAF, or whatever, I'd try to work it through.
Secondly, please do make every possible--even superhuman--effort to audition in your home. Even if it means renting a truck to haul them back and forth a hundred miles there simply is no other way to determine how speakers will sound in your space until you put them there and spend some days experimenting and listening.
If all this sounds extreme....well, audiophilia IS a disease, after all, and you definitely seem to have the early symptoms. :)
Good luck!
