I hope you don't mind a dealer's $.02. I'll try not to be too partisan here...
I've owned Maggies MMG, 12, 1.6, and 3.6. I've owned electrostat/dynamic hybrids made by Martin Logan and Sound Lab (I'm a dealer for the latter). I've owned full-range electrostats from Quad and of course Sound Lab.
Your question focuses on electrostatic/dynamic hybrids vs full-range planar magnetics (Maggies), and as you could probably guess each excels in different areas. Electrostatic elements in my opinion usually give superior resolution of low-level detail. Some electrostat hybrids give you a small sweet spot (InnerSound), some a medium sized sweet spot (Martin Logan), and some a fairly large sweet spot (Sound Lab). Maggies are capable of giving you you a fairly good sized sweet spot.
The bass of a good box woofer (such as InnerSound's transmission line system) will go deeper and have more solid impact than a dipole bass system (like the Maggies), but dipole bass in my experience does a very good job with pitch definition.
Now the achilles' heel of a hybrid system is the difficulty in blending the point-source woofer with the line-source (and sometimes narrow-pattern) panel. Not only to they have very different sonic signatures, they actually propagate sound differently! That's right - the sound pressure level actually falls off more rapidly with distance from the woofer than from the panel. So either you want to be able to adjust the relative levels of woofer and panel for your room and listening distance, or you want to do a very good job of choosing the right hybrid speaker for your room.
Once I had a pair of Maggie 3.6's side-by-side with Sound Lab Dynastats in my living room. So I had the chance to do some in-depth comparisons. One thing I quickly noticed was that I really had to do a good job of dialing in the controls on the Dynastats, for the overall tonal balance of the Maggies was very nice. The Maggies were the more forgiving speaker, but they did give up some harmonic richness and texture to the Dynastats, and the Dynastats were more lively at low volume levels. The Dynastats went quite a bit deeper as would be expected, but the Maggies were more coherent. Unfortunately (for me as a dealer), you could hear the discontinuity between the Dynastat's woofer and panel. The Maggies had no such issues. So there wasn't a clear winner - each did some things better.
I'm not sure what your price range is, but you might consider Quads as a possible alternative to hybrids or Maggies.
Best of luck in your quest!
Duke LeJeune
AudioKinesis
