StephenH

A couple of extra thoughts:
-Half or more of the time, when I shift, I shift more than one gear. So I've seen the jump-between-bears being touted as an advantage of 12 speed over 11 or whatever, but in my case, I guess I'm pretty tolerant to a wider range of cadence. So I'd be concerned with overall gear range, not so much the spacing between gears. As long as you're geared low enough that you're in danger of falling over, you should be good there.
-On the "sounds good on paper"- my first "real" bike was a Raleigh Sojourn, and I got a lot of miles out of the thing. However, the stock rear wheel only lasted about 4,000 miles, and the warranty replacement lasted 500 miles (then I had a rear wheel built up that lasted 50,000 miles or so). So the moral there, is that it was a bike that was specced as a touring bike, had all the features you'd want for that, but wasn't really up to the task, either, at least in its stock version. You can take a $200 or $300 bike and make it sound wonderful in the catalog writeup. But that makes it hard for us to judge your proposed bike when we haven't used it.