One more week has passed, and I've narrowed down and have adjusted my focus more.
Kawai wooden action while great is too light for me, so Yamaha it is. Now it's down to which one.
CLP-270, CLP-280, CVP-307
The dealer quoted an official price for the CLP-270 (don't think it's list price because it was fairly low for a list price) of $4000. By standards, I think that $3200-$3300 (with delivery but pre-tax) would be more than fair.
The dealer didn't quote a price in the CLP-280, but it should be $1000 more than the CLP-270 and lists for around $5400, so somewhere in the ballpark of $4200 and a couple hundred more for the nice ebony or mahogany polish would be reasonable.
The final candidate is one I haven't really brought to light just because of the price which I thought was much higher but turned out not to be the case. The CVP-307 has a list price of $6500, but can be easily be brought down to $5200. So what's the difference?
The CVP-307 is like the CLP-270 except that it has a ton (and I mean a ton!) of features that make it very good for both piano practice and composition. You can record stuff, output it as sheet music and send it off to the computer. The converse is true. You can take MIDI files on the computer, play them back on the CVP and even show the sheet music for them on the CVP's screen. That's just one of many alluring features. Given that I do own a CVP currently, I appreciate the extra features it provides and may feel more at home with it, but it all comes back to price. I really like the features on the CVP, but it costs more than the 280, and I lose the wooden keyboard. The 309 has this keyboard but it costs yet another $1000 more, so somewhere in the $6000's, far out of my budget.
So that's a little update on my piano search. I'll report back again in about a week.