I haven't owned all the dac's you mentioned, but I own the Spring Kitsune lv 3. plus a few other dac's. Right now chi-fi has clouded the picture on price/performance; meaning that there are some very good sounding dac's for under $1000 from companies such as Audio-GD and Denefrips that compete at 3-4 times their price. Also, someone could argue the lineup from Soekris (Dutch) competes way above the price.
I suspect that the 2K-4K range offers similar performance/different flavor kind of thing, then 4K-8K similar performance/different flavor, and so on.
You could do much worse than purchase a Spring.