you'd pick Yamaha or Denon.

Personally, for $1,000-4,000, I think Yamaha is the best value and well built - although there's generally one ONE 1,000 and ONE 4,000 AV receiver in their lineup. Heck, even the 500-1000 price point has some decent low end AV offerings.

I have 20+ year old Yamaha gear that still runs as well as the day it come out of the box. They run pure and CLEAN and take a pounding.

Very reliable over-all, particularly compared with Denon. Not that it matters much these days. 5 years is as long as we'll want to keep our receivers with the way technology is moving along.
I kept my HK AVR510 for about 2 years before upgrading to a Yamaha RXV2400. The HK sounded better with music, but I have another amp (Musical Fidelity A300) to take care of that. the 2400 has all the right features I want. The microphone set-up is garbage though. Sounds better when tuned by ear. use an SPL meter if you have to, and then tweak by ear, but forget the mic'.

First receiver I bought for surround sound.
I'm no audiophile, nor do I listen to music a lot in the home, but I watch movies, and the surround sound is great.
I bought a middle of the road receiver, nothing fancy, and it does its job.
Programming it was a b!tch to figure out though, nut I finally have it dialed in so that I can watch TV shows in surround sound, and then another click to CD's, then another click to movies.
But from what I hear, many receivers are a PITA to program just right, if you do it yourself.

Current stuff seems to have been seriously infected with cheapness. Flimsy, cheap feeling buttons, poor binding posts, poor construction, mediocre sound.

Pitty... they used to be very good for the money.

These days I'd buy a NAD. NickS has one and it is really sweet.

dumbing down their lines for best buy et al. My first receiver was a Yamaha stereo, built in the 70s and that thing was awesome. Denon ever since.

95% usage for movies.

To my ears my RX-V1400 when YPAO-tuned sounds better than with it off. I verified its level settings with my SPL and it got them spot-on. As for the auto-PEQ, I don't have the equipment to perform a frequency response test, but to my ears, it helped improve the sound. My room acoustics are non-optimal, though. Perhaps in a good listening room YPAO's PEQ is less useful.

Best buy sells the low end crap - HTR models and all that.

Have you ever listened to the RXV2400?

So I have a lot of experience with the RX-V995, RX-V2095, RX-V1, etc. They were pretty good, horrible remotes, but sounded nice when paired up with decent speakers. Been a Denon fan well before that though.

but had I had to fork out (I won the 2400 in a sales incentive) I would've probably gone for the NAD T763. Sonically a class leader to my ears with my prefered speakers. A toroidal transformer at under $1400 is very rare on surround receivers.