Turntable versus tonearm versus cartridge: which is MOST important?

This makes more sense:

Take the $500 for the cartridge/turntable and order a nice bottle of wine.

Then take the $10k and buy a $4k turntable, a $4k tonearm and a $2k cartridge.

I didn't say it was the right answer...just that it made more sense.

sandthemall, if sense had anything to do with this none of us would be here.

You can attempt to disregard the "everything matters" argument but it doesn't make it less pertinent, and trying to use price as the only criteria
may not be the best way forward when asking "which is more important" (which is not too far removed from "which is better") question, is probably not the question to ask in the first place.  You see experienced and knowledgeable people above give council while trying to work around the inevitable truth that every piece or interactions between pieces in the signal path is a potential bottleneck.  I just watched a video with VPI's Harry and Matt Weisfeld, and they both had remarked about how good a $50 Audio-Technica cartridge (they didn't say which one, so I would say it's the AT95E) sounded on their $20k HW-40 table; to be clear, they didn't advise that and recommended higher quality carts, but the point was made that the associated equipment allowed a modest cartridge to shine regardless of the price, because everything else stayed out of the way.

$500 can get you a nice cartridge, it does not have to be something unworthy of a nice table.  You can then upgrade the cartridge in time.  It is far harder to upgrade the table or arm, unless both are purchased at the same time. 

When looking for that nice table, look for models that put an emphasis on the arm.  It is getting harder to find decent arms these days (a major OEM maker for a number of brands--Jelco--went out of business).  The arm will become quite important when you do upgrade the cartridge; many of the better cartridges are lower in compliance (stiffer suspension) which means they have a tendency to feed back more energy into the arm which has to be stiff enough to handle this energy and the bearings musst also be stiff enough not to rattle while being low enough in friction for their movement to be unrestricted.  

OP's question is purposely obtuse, as kingbarbuda points out.  Any real buyer would really ask "How do I apportion my $10.5K bundle to get the best sounding set?".  In that case there are environmental considerations to consider in the choice of turntable and tonearm, but clearly most of the budget goes there.  Nobody should buy such an expensive cart on that budget.