Well, all i can say is for that price of 1000 dollars, ide go a 10" dobsonian, theres been a heap on the forums lately for 500 dollars. and considering your running with pure Visual, you want aperature, and also considering you want to look at DSO's the bigger the better.
the difference between the size will be brightness and details. clarity should be with any scope.
Things to get Irrispective of scope size:-
a good set of hex keys
a good phillips and flat screwdriver
a laser collimator (youll have to do some mods to anything cheaper than about 100-150 bucks, but they are easy to do, just take a few momoents of your time)
a cheschire eye piece.
go with the standard eye pieces for a start, then your next purchase should be a good quality 2x barlow, followed by a 20mm eye piece, 40mm eye piece and then a 10mm eye piece.
and then get rid of all the standard ones.
If your thinking about attaching a camera to your telescope. everything changes dramatically!
let me know if you are going down that path.