My guess is that you can't go wrong with either - both companies have been building statement HT receivers for years and appear to be quite good at it. I've always been a fan of Denon gear, but have no basis to recommend it over Yamaha.
The criticism you read I would interpret as - when you're in 1080p mode, if you change the volume, you won't see the volume flash up on the screen momentarily to make it easy to see what is happening - you'd have to look at the front panel.
It has been a while since I've shopped for HT gear, but I would think the decision would come down to feature-set capability - do they both do HDMI switching, do they both do all of the sound decoding formats you want, etc. Personally, I find the feature explosion on these things to be over the top, especially the decoding capabilities. In any case, I haven't shopped since HDMI became real, so I'd want to convince myself that the receiver I was choosing did an excellent job of handling / switching HDMI if that's the connection format of choice for you.
To veer off your two choices for a second, given that you have an extremely nice system and already have a separate amp for your fronts, etc., have you considered going for separates. If you have to have HDMI switching, or you want to buy new, it's probably a non-starter, but for what I imagine the receivers cost, you could get a very nice used pre/pro and a very nice used 5-channel amp. I'm sure you've already considered this route and rejected it, but it's a route I would look at closely if I was making the purchase.
The criticism you read I would interpret as - when you're in 1080p mode, if you change the volume, you won't see the volume flash up on the screen momentarily to make it easy to see what is happening - you'd have to look at the front panel.
It has been a while since I've shopped for HT gear, but I would think the decision would come down to feature-set capability - do they both do HDMI switching, do they both do all of the sound decoding formats you want, etc. Personally, I find the feature explosion on these things to be over the top, especially the decoding capabilities. In any case, I haven't shopped since HDMI became real, so I'd want to convince myself that the receiver I was choosing did an excellent job of handling / switching HDMI if that's the connection format of choice for you.
To veer off your two choices for a second, given that you have an extremely nice system and already have a separate amp for your fronts, etc., have you considered going for separates. If you have to have HDMI switching, or you want to buy new, it's probably a non-starter, but for what I imagine the receivers cost, you could get a very nice used pre/pro and a very nice used 5-channel amp. I'm sure you've already considered this route and rejected it, but it's a route I would look at closely if I was making the purchase.