its me wrote:
Any comments on relative merits of these brands?

I am looking at the 30 foot range.

Cruisers new 300 and the Four Winns 298.

Also considering a Sea Ray 300.

Quality?
Resale?

etc

Not personally all that familiar with Four Winns, but Cruisers and Sea
Ray are both good choices. (As Four Winns may be as well).

On a well made boat, a lot of "quality" issues are subjective.
Be sure that any builder will point out the specific areas where their
company excels, (or at least does something very different), and tell
you that "quality" is the result of....(insert specific thing here). If
a boat is well made, there can be a number of different approaches that
will result in a quality job. Let's say that brick homes are often
considered higher "quality" than stick-built- that doesn't mean that a
stick-built home can't be high quality or that all brick homes are
automatically superior to stick-built......and it's much the same with
boats.

Sometimes other people (not you) set out to buy a boat with a mindset
that most of the stuff available is just pure crap- but there will be
that one, single, exception actually worthy of their hard earned bucks.
Funny thing is that equally intelligent people approach the problem of
finding the "one, pure boat" with equal research and diligence- and
will wind up with wildly different conclusions. The good news is that
the vast majority of boats offered for sale are fundamentally sound
vessels that should provide some sort of acceptable and safe
performance when used with common sense in an appropriate application.

If you're considering gasoline engines (a huge component on a boats
like you're comparing) we can accept going in that there will be very
few important differences in machinery.

"What's the better entree, halibut or salmon?"

As far as resale goes, why worry? If you expect to be reselling the
boat in a couple of years in order to purchase
"MODEL X" instead, it makes a lot more sense to purchase MODEL X right
now. MODEL X will simply continue to go up in price while you wait,
(adding additional dollars to the ultimate cost), while the "make-do"
boat will likely depreciate at least 20% the first year (and 40-50%
within 5 years) and that simply adds additonal dollars to the final
cost of MODEL X. You will have the expenses associated with two
purchases as well as one sale.

Boats are lousy investments, from a financial perspective, but
excellent lifestyle enhancers. Boats that cost a lot more new usually
bring a lot more used, but depreciation as a percentage of original
purchase price won't vary wildly. One reason for that is that new boat
markups are fairly standard throughout the industry- and that accounts
for that rule of thumb 20% depreciation the first year. Your
one-year-old "used" boat will be competing against left-over blowouts
that are still "new", and a year-old resale will need to offered for
less than the wholesale cost of a new boat if you hope to attract a
buyer.

One other bit of advice on resale: Pick a brand that has strong
representation in your area and is in demand. While it is true that
most boats depreciate at roughly about the same percentage rates, if
you've got some boat that you hauled in from four states away and that
few people in your locale are familiar with you may find local demand
artificially depressed at resale time-

Good luck with your decision. Most of it will be subjective, (as in
layout, options, etc) but it sounds like you're picking from some
decent boats to begin with.