Which direction to go?

I've been playing with track planning and whatnot tonight, and I'm coming to a fork in the road with this layout. I've kept aisleways huge and compression very minimal so far, and in some ways that has come back to bite me. There's two ways I can take the design from here, and they're explained below.

1. Increase level of compression dramatically for future additions, add helixes, and increase grades on the layout. Hinton yard would be awkwardly crammed into a corner over the washer/dryer. Meadow Creek would also be seriously crammed into who knows where, if I could fit it at all. Its branch would be nothing but a staging stub. Thurmond would be just a little stump of a layout segment bereft of its yard, or at most a couple stub-ended tracks tucked under another scene.

2. Maintain the current open-room feel and linear flow to the layout, but some iconic locations (Thurmond, Hinton) would be present in name only as staging areas. Beyond the current Prince and Quinnimont segment, I'd have Piney Creek branch up to Raleigh yard, the wye, staging for the branch going towards Beckley, and a continuation of this end of the layout across the VGN diamond at Pemberton, WV (complete with display loop for VGN trains) to the jointly-served Affinity mine. I'd probably have room for a decent representation of Meadow Creek and may be able to include some of the NF&G in reasonable form as a second deck or "mushroomed" area.

I started out with a LDE based on a location near Hinton, but soon switched to Prince and Quinnimont as being center stage for the layout since that area along with the Piney Creek branch could stand alone as a decent layout. I still have the CW Cabin (Hinton) LDE, it has suffered some storage wounds but would be ready to go with some minor repair and track cleaning. But on the other hand, I could gut it for its switch motors and such, and call it an experiment that is now over. There's only so much I can fit in half a basement (other half is the garage, and that's a whole 'nother ballgame... not even my layout is allowed to take over the garage!)

DCC equipment install

I rolled around a few ideas for what to do with the DCC system components. I wanted something elegant and "built in", not just the command station and related items stuffed on a shelf somewhere. Originally I had settled on a small wall-mounted 19" IT/telecom rack, but last night the design for this simple beauty hit me. I sat and pondered it a while, and this morning I went to get some lumber and put it all together. It beats the cost and unnecessary complexity of the rackmount idea.

This is located under the Prince, WV portion of the layout. Removal of two screws allows it to swing down for service. I wanted a single power switch for the entire layout. That's on the left side, light switch with indicator light. I built this with two holes for Digitrax boosters, although I only have one at the moment. I plan to add a DCS100 and split the layout into two power districts. Also visible is the Locobuffer USB, I mounted it to be visible because of the status LEDs on it. Originally I'd planned to use a dedicated Linux PC as a JMRI server, but since I have another machine just a few feet away (and it's on almost 24x7), I'll just use it instead. Just need to round up about a 12-15 foot USB A-B cable.