There's definitely a coverage gap in that price bracket. Aside from the few options from Jands, Pathway, and maybe Strand/ETC at their lowest level there isn't too much to get excited about right now until you spend upwards of 5-10k on a desk, and with the Congo Kid now being a legacy product there's yet another gap between the two extremes. Hopefully more companies will start taking note of what the X32 did to the digital mixer market and attempt the same for lighting. I have yet to play with a QuickQ but hopefully it'll be a solid board and usher in more budget controllers that make good lighting control available to more people.
I just bit the bullet and got a Chamsys MQ40. It's a solid unit that has a good feel. I'm fairly new to lighting at this level but I'm liking this console a lot so far. Limited to 4 universes but can add a monitor and an additional playback wing, if desired. Chauvet has been offering 2 day MagicQ classes at their Ft. Lauderdale location, which really help get my head around the programming flow. I also like that I can easily export any show and still use a Mac, Linux, or Windows computer as a backup or for smaller, secondary shows if I had to, with just the USB dongle while still doing all the programming on the console.