I'm very keen on the d&b workflow and products, too. I like the sound of much of l'Acoustics products, what I don't care for is how they get from point A to point B. That can be remedied with time and patience and money.
Yanni was a very stable artist so that was a good career choice. He was married to that rich and beutiful soap actress so I think he had the cheez to fund the deal.
For those of us in the trenches that opportunity smells like a rental to me.
It's so funny to see everyone's preferences. My love of L and Kara, Tim with JBL and Brian with D&B can't go wrong with any of those brands. Choose a solid partner though.
I also want to make it clear I love Avantis (have one at my church) and DLive it just is non existent in the rental market. I am not an Avid fan so the smaller Rivage or Digico are going to be the consoles most available in the rental market. I actually only know one person in Wisconsin that rents his D-Live but he usually goes out with the console.
I'm not sure what *current* JBL products generate antipathy, but back in the VerTec days the issue was system owners who "cowboyed" their coverage and processing. When JBL finally got to V4 presets and locked most of the important parameters from meddling system owners the damage of inconsistent rigs was done.
And that validated the approach l'Acoustics took: system owners must take training, limit the changes an SE or owner to only preset changes, and control gain staging and circuit power by requiring specific power amps, among a list of requirements. Their goal was to give BEs world-wide, a consistent PA no matter where the system was located. JBL pissed that away for too long.
My old boss was FOH for an international act "very popular with the scooter crowd" and bitched that every VerTec rig he mixed on sounded different. When it was time to buy a line array for his shop... he ended up with VerTec. I got a lot of miles out of those rigs and usually the BEs were complimentary. "Best VerTec rig I've mixed on" and "you must have spent a lot of time working this rig." Mostly I made the pretty pictures in the coverage calculator, put the PA up the way it said to, and powered it right.
Failure to correctly use a manufacturer's prediction software and configuration files will compromise any brand of system.