Well, currently nobody owns a 997, of course, so it's going to be at least somewhat supposition. Having said that, I think a pretty strong case can still be made for the Model 990. You will be giving up room correction and internal video processing, and you will need to look for a Blu-ray player with multichannel analog output when you decide to get into Blu-ray. Otherwise, the 990 remains a very good performer even today.

This may also be useful: I've spent a fair bit of a time with an Onkyo PR-SC885 since the latter part of last year, and prior to that I used a Model 990 for over three years. Granted, my room's acoustics are pretty reasonable and I had an SMS-1 to help with subwoofer EQ, so I'm not the best person to evaluate the full potential of Audyssey to fix problem rooms, but I wasn't especially amazed by Audyssey. Additionally, the one source that needs video processing the most in my system is my cable box, but a combination of the box's own stubbornness to provide an unprocessed signal and the slow video signal acquisition time of the 885's Reon have left me continuing to use the cable box's dreadful deinterlacing and scaling. Oh, and my wife has said numerous times that she preferred the 990 - sonically, she heard no benefit to the 885, and functionally the 885 gets on her nerves in ways that the 990 did not (slower audio signal acquisition, for example). Fortunately we already had a good universal remote, because the 885's remote would have driven her up the wall.