500I gets my vote. Buy once, cry once. Like Hermio wrote, use it, take care of it, and if you decide to part with it....
Paul, sounds like my area as far as Stihl techs and dealers. The best one got flooded out several years ago and just couldn't recover. The local ones now, have trouble putting on their shoes , let alone tying the laces. The only one decent is 30 miles away. Father was fair, his son took over and has a holier than thou attitude. My neighbor owns a local Agway / Stihl sales. I try only to buy oil from him as his son also took over. Very common to see items for sale with three price stickers overlapping.Unless you're going to learn how to fix saws, you will want a really competent dealer not too far away. There are a lot of hundred-dollar-per-hour boobs pretending to be saw mechanics, so it's not like you can just walk into any authorized repair place and not find a moron behind the counter. If you want another Stihl, make sure you can get to a good Stihl dealer or repair shop pretty quickly.
Concerning Echo, I got a Timberwolf and thought it was a horrible saw until I got the straight dope on maintaining and running it. The Echo repair places around here are slow or staffed with people who have trouble tying their shoes, and I had a hard time getting good information on the web so I could do things myself, but now that I have a few clues, the saw is great. The guts are pretty much like a pro saw. The carb's main jet is a problem, but you might not care, and if you do, it probably means you're the kind of person who can replace it.
I don't know anything about Stihls. I tried to buy one at the nearest dealer, but they didn't know anything about their products, so I drove to a Husqvarna place and bought a 562XP.
My feeling about saws, after 7 years of living on a farm and dealing with a zillion fallen oaks, is that a land owner needs 1) a cordless pole saw for 85% of the work, 2) a light, overpowered 16" saw for cutting stuff up to 10 inches, and 3) a very strong 20"-minimum saw for the things he will hate doing with a 16" saw.
Saw Suppliers gave me a really nice deal on an Echo because I am in a disaster zone.
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