I stepped away from this thread for a while and in the meantime, I bought an XT and put it to the test a couple of weeks later by running a 1,400 mile round robin trip. Memphis to Huntsville, AL -> Chattanooga, TN -> the Dragon and surrounding area -> Cincinnati, OH -> back to Memphis.
In summary, the thing was brilliant.
Playing mp3's worked great (something that for one reason or another I've never done on a motorcycle), I made and received a few calls and I loved the weather radar! I ran through about 400 miles of steady rain with occasional very heavy downpours that I knew were coming thanks to this feature. The routing worked great though I will say that Basecamp is a horrible tool to use. I mean, once I figured it out, it worked and the XT followed the three Smokie Mountain routes I set up perfectly with no issues whatsoever. There was a day or two there where I was about ready to throw the kit into a chipper.
Traffic worked very well. I had it paired to my phone and evidently Garmin is tied into a real-time, or near real-time database as it warned me numerous times about traffic issues, even in fairly remote areas. It did miss one or two backups but on the whole, it worked much better than I expected. I do wish text notifications would time out rather than having to be individually dismissed. It also lost its mind once but that was resolved immediately by restarting it (I didn't even have to restart the route, it just picked up right where it left off).
As for cost, I got it for $399 thanks to another one of special sales and it was well worth that.
Basecamp was a nightmare and I was about to return the thing (the built-in trip planner is horrible BTY) until I stumbled on
this YouTube series. While there are a number of tutorial series out there, I found most of them either too long or filled with "hit subscribe to..." prompts, "buy my maintenance videos series" commercials (if you ride a Goldwing you know know I'm talking about) and useless jabbering preambles. This guy's channel hit the perfect sweet spot - concise, to the point, relatively brief (who wants to sit through 5 hours of video to learn how to plan a route? Not me). One pass through a subset of all the parts and I was working with Basecamp like a pro. Of course, you do need to double check any waypoints you select. For instance, Southern Honda in Chattanooga recently moved and the Garmin database still has their old address. Google however was correct. Though that was the one and only error I encountered, it was notable and a good lesson-learned.