Hi jwdw,
Thanks for taking the time to share such detailed and informative feedback and comments about your research and the choice you ended up making … I appreciate it!
You certainly made a great quality/value choice and most importantly … congratulations on your new mattress 
There are comments and feedback from members here about SleepEZ that go back over 4 years and there are other comments and feedback on the web about them that go back years before that as well … but I don’t tend to pay much attention to mattress reviews anyway. Comments about the knowledge and service of a retailer or manufacturer can certainly be helpful but they really don’t provide any meaningful information about the quality or durability of a mattress or whether any specific mattress would be suitable for any particular person (see post #13 here and the posts it links to). A forum search on SleepEZ (you can just click the link) will bring up all the forum posts that mention them (there are currently over 3400).
You can see my comments about the Old Bed Guy and his website (and some of the very strange comments he makes) in this topic.
You can also see my comments about the Consumer Reports mattress ratings and recommendations in post #2 here and in this topic. While they may be a good source of information about more “objective” purchases … as you can see I would consider them to be an unreliable source of information or guidance about purchasing a mattress. My thoughts are also shared by most of the more knowledgeable people in the industry (see post #5 here for an example).
I think this can be a great idea for those that don’t want to use softer layers but need some extra softness in their mattress. There is more about the effect of having a separate topper vs having the same layer inside the mattress cover in posts #3 and #4 here and in this topic.
Thanks again for taking all the time you did to write such detailed comments and feedback.
Phoenix