The AVM30 is a very respectable piece of hardware - some of that extra $2000 certainly gives you a little more. My SSP chart has the AVM40 in it these days instead of the AVM30, but the feature sets are similar if you throw out the 40's HDMI. The 990 offers auto-setup, phono input, and a 7.1 analog input instead of 5.1, but otherwise the AVM30 will readily show itself to be one of the "kings of menu options" that it is. You can tweak a lot of settings in an Anthem AVM.

Both Outlaw and Anthem offer good customer support, although with Anthem there's also the question of how good your local dealer is. Here in Memphis, we don't currently have a Paradigm/Anthem dealer because the old one closed several months ago.

Sound quality is important too, of course. The Anthem should have an edge on the 990, although how much is hard to say - there are some resources such as this old AVS thread and this related saloon thread . As you can tell by some of the tangents in those threads (mainly the AVS one), it's a subject that some people get very invested in. Both will sound good as long as you set them up with some care (forum member UMtiger has heard my 990/7500 system and an AVM30 system at our now defunct local Anthem dealer and found my setup to sound clearly better, which confirms that you can set any piece of gear up incorrectly and not achieve its full potential). If one will have an edge over the other, I'd expect the Anthem to come out on top, but I don't know how much edge there will be sonically.