Instead of magazine reviews, try to read more on user reviews; you will find more revealing traits about Presonus gear - since I'm primarily a Sonar user, the Sonar forums do mention these Presonus quirks a lot. This is not to say that all Presonus stuff are bad, but the Firestudio/Firepod has some idiosyncracies which can affect your productivity. The Firestudio preamps are good enough if you're worried about them, but if you get a chance to compare them to really good preamps, say something like a Grace Design Model 101, you'll know what I mean. I'm thinking that adding a very good clock might improve the Firestudio's converters substantially, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Eggcrates? Stay away from them.