My only question to you, Chris, is where have you been for the last, oh, dozen years? In 1997 I bought an 88-key Roland digital piano that has hammer-action keys and sounds really good when you unplug the built-in speakers and play it through my sound system. Yeah, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the AvantGrand, but all that shaking and what have you probably add, I would guess, about one or two percent to the verisimilitude. In about a minute I forgot I wasn't playing on my old crappy spinet.
And it does have a few bells and whistles of its own. I can adjust the apparent key resistance, and choose among several instrument combinations (a big bright grand like a Steinway, a "soft" grand like a Bechstein, a honky-tonk piano, an electric), including some terrible synth strings. The pedals work fine and I have been plunking away happily for years on it. (Yeah, even butchered some Rachmaninoff on it, too, which was never even possible on the spinet.)
The point is, you didn't have to wait for Yamaha to "perfect" the digital piano. Going from a PSO (a "piano-shaped object," which basically describes just about any home-kept piano) to a decent digital is such a big step up that it's been an obvious choice for a lot of people for years. So Yamaha's digital isn't really new, and it isn't really news. If I were in the market to switch at the moment I'd surely consider it, but I get so much out of my current instrument that I couldn't justify the cost. And unless your playing is an order of magnitude or so better than mine, your skill probably wouldn't justify the extra cost, either.
