Final thread revival on this topic, I reckon I found my car. Ultimately the Forester was just too big for the SO's taste so I drove the XV 2.0i instead in both manual and CVT guise.
What a nice overall package: not as expensive as most SUV's I've driven, more vooma than the Vitara, a pretty decent interior, great handling and of course permanent AWD!
For those interested, I took the "scientific" approach to test driving no less than 6 different small/medium SUV's here are my final results (xls format):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz-vHUT656IlMEFtYmJ6dHJaSE0
Top table is the raw data (obviously some categories are subjective) and the bottom is a conversion to % scores relative to the "winner" of each category so an overall average score could be calculated.
More of an attempt to help counter against emotions taking over than anything else, not like I was a slave to the results either