I own an Amiga 3000 since 1994. The machine is amazing. I have never hat the urge to even touch an Amiga 1200 when I could use the A3000. I brought her to 6MB of RAM and a whopping 800MB of diskspace, which was all I ever needed for that box (except for NetBSD which wouldnt run X with less than 6MB of fast RAM / and 2 of mine are chip RAM).
In 2007 the battery acid killed the display enhancer hardware and I added a GFX-card to make up for the missing flickerfixer. Also I tried to make the Amiga join my lan whith a network card. Both of these boards failed to impress me however.
In a way I don't think the benefits of the A3000 over the A500 are all that significant. I have used my Amiga 500 from 1988 to 1993 and it was always good enough for anything except ray-tracing was slow. But hey - ray tracing is slow today on a quad core PC!
So in essence: The Amiga 1000 will be a great choice, too. And it might even save you some desk-space.
