Hi Andrew,
glad you're throwing your hat in - it was a long time between drinks for the last 2 meetups!
With regard to your hone buying dilemma, my on-paper preference (for whatever it's worth) would be for a selection of the Shapton glass stones over anything else. I've seen them in action at the wood shows, as well as Lynn's video of the 1000 as a bevel setter, and I'm pretty impressed. They don't dish at anything like the rate of water stones and there is the advantage of no coloured and staining residue, such as some of the Chosera and Naniwa stones produce. I'm now on the verge of buying a 1000 Shapton GS as a bevel setter as I'm sick of constantly having to flatten my King 1000 - besides, the King is a great stone for chef's knives and I'd like to dedicate mine to that task.
BTW, I'm seriously looking forward to putting a blade over the Esher - as I imagine several others are too - I can see a queue forming :p
Last thought: one of the benefits of owning an Esher is that you wouldn't have to buy the Shapton 16000 - a pretty expensive stone - instead, you could just buy the 1000, 4000 and 8000. One more thing: a big advantage of the Shapton 4000 and 8000 over the Norton 4k/8k combo is that they're good to go from day one, that is you don't have to spend hours carving a mm or more off the 4000 before it's ready to use, as you would probably have to do with the Norton 4k - see many threads on this forum for advice on this.
regards
Mike