Thanks very much for your replies Tandum, Gary, Multiweb, Matt and Eric. All great reading. I really appreciated the photos of your setup Eric. I can feel myself being drawn down the 80mm path, and even looked significantly into the Megrez 88 last night - which doesn't look to be the goods for imaging unfortunately.
It was a long cloudy night last night, as it usually is on the weekends in Sydney, so I put in many hours of research. I found many an excellent thread on the forums here that helped me to build a better picture of what I can do, and what I should steer clear of. I can't believe the wealth of experience on these forums.
I now have a spreadsheet comparing pricing and features of:
William Optics ZenithStar 80II
Orion EON 80mm
Stellarvue SV80ED Raptor Carbon Fibre
William Optics Megrez 90
William Optics Megrez 88
with the ZenithStar 80II, Orion EON 80mm and Stellarvue SV80ED Raptor being of the greatest interest to me. A lot of this comes down to them having the greatest FOV.
I ran the specs of each scope through Ron Wodaski's CCD Calculator to see how they would compare FOV wise with the camera I currently have, and also compared to what I'm already doing on the LX200GPS at f/3.3.
I considered using my existing camera as a guide camera on a dedicated cheaper guide-only scope, and grabbing a QHY8 (for example) to see if that would better suit the bill for widefield imaging as well. However, that ended up being the most expensive option and had a few downsides - like not having the added benefit of a grab and go scope at the end of the day.
I've priced up rings, dovetails, 2D weight systems, field flatteners, guide cameras and extension drawtubes as well. As I'm sure so many others have done before me, I've started drowning in research. At least, however, plonking it all into a single spreadsheet for comparison is helping things along to an eventual conclusion. After all, daddy wants a new toy
At the end of it all, it looks like I'll be up for between about $1500 (ZS80II plus all ancillary gear) and $2000 (Megrez90 plus all gear).
I think I might go and do some more research
Dean