(1) Best of luck on the DTS software. Any processor today should offer DTS, of course - DTS ES is the 6.1 extension, comparable to Dolby EX.

(2) DTS 96/24 only works for material encoded for DTS 96/24. The 990's upsampling does sound like it allows upsampling to 192/24 of stereo sources.

(3) The problem people are having with DVI in place of HDMI is a result of HDMI's ability to carry audio as well as video, whereas DVI can only carry video. If you acknowledge that HDMI's audio support is still evolving and the final form may not be hardware compatible with existing HDMI hardware, then DVI instead of HDMI isn't really a problem.