My first arranger keyboard was a Tyros 3, many years back now, however I was not as successful as you in getting there. I had used Band In a Box for quite a long time, (since the early 90's) I had a job where I had to do 20 nursery rhymes, with singers, and each song in a different style within one month. Band In a Box was a life saver.. Some of it's styles were OK, but not real 'stand out'. But it would very quickly 'flesh' out a song for me. and give a 'framework' to work the song. I used it with a huge collection of hardware synths. So I really liked the premise of what it did, I just wanted something more professional sounding
I had never looked at an 'arranger kbd' before. The Tyros 3 was great, but way to expensive in my mind. I bought a Motif XS rack, with all their arpeggios, because the store dealer implied, it was real easy to create songs that way. While I liked the Motif, but the ability to quickly build a song was not what it was designed for. . Next I bought a Korg M3 with it's built in Karma software.. The Karma software is impressive, like super arpeggios on steroids. But extremely complex, I couldn't get it to do exactly what I wanted.
My intention was I wanted to quickly get a good foundation of a song, then modify from there. The old method was a recording studio, where you have to record the song, with at least 4 - 6 parts to get a decent reference if you got it right. Then you might decide to rewrite some chords, change key, tempo etc. So finding just the right 'version' of the song, could be a considerable amount of time. So it was very laborious and time consuming to get the song right.
So after two expensive false starts with the , I bought the Tyros 3.. Only one store carried them in NYC, and they could not be demo'd.. You had to buy it sight unseen. After scouring the internet, in spite of the $$$ I bought it. The store here in NYC, had a 30 day no questions asked return policy.. So I wasn't at risk.. 10 minutes after I turned on the T3, I was totally in love with it.
One of Yamaha's real strengths, is their 'voicing' of an instrument.. That is, while there are some great instrument patches, There are few real 'punch you in the eye' sounds. But their choice of sounds is very carefully designed so that you know, any combination of instruments, will fit together, 'homogenize' together real well. Just pulling up a style and playing, gives you the expertise experience of 10 years of recording engineering. The blending of the sounds, and it's compressor, gives you a 1st rate mixing/engineered sound.
Since then it has been a much easier process for me to buy a new piece of hardware. You did it right the first time.. Great.. You are going to have many, many hours of happy playing..