Guidance

The room is 50% of the sound. How well do you understand your room's contribution to what you're hearing? If you answer "not very well" then you should stop researching gear immediately and start looking into your room. It's really that simple.

I agree that my room is less than ideal (but with three middle school kids, I have what I have  :)) . I have walls on north and east side, with west side with three large bay windows and south side with a set of French doors. I did put in sound dampening on the north side wall which has helped remove some of the sloppiness in the sound. I was infact researching and probably will call a local acoustic company for some consultation and see if they can help me in making my listening room non reflective, which I know for a fact would definitely help

This is great information and I totally sympathize with the constraints of family. If I were to ask you a brutally honest question (constructively, amiably) it would be this: Given that many of the changes you make will not be truly understood until your room is accounted for, acoustically, are you actually just interested in trying gear out for the pleasure of it? Nothing wrong with that, but just as one does not eat a candy bar while telling themselves it is nutritious, no one should fool themselves with changing gear and thinking they're making a significant improvement if their room is really not acoustically solid. 

Put another way, if you plan to make your room better, acoustically, if you do it later then some of the changes you make now may not be correct later. That's why it's good to understand your own plans and motivations. And hey, maybe if you measure your room now, you might see it's not so bad, acoustically. Knowing that would clear the way to more gear swapping with significant and real impacts.

I am of the mindset that I should overinvest now (even though in very very small steps) to make sure that changes I make would pay dividends long term, and I can eventually get to a system I'd enjoy for a long while.

Good deal. I am saying what I did because I spent too much on speakers with Be tweeters that turned out to be too bright -- not at the beginning, when my room sucked, but later after I got my room in better shape. In other words, good gear then didn't turn out to be good gear later. And I wasted a lot of time shopping and spending and then selling those speakers (and some other gear, too.).