I wouldn't worry about paying to much remember these units were well over 1000.00 USD originally and many people gladly paid that.

I would encode at the lowest bitrate that sounds good to you with the type of music you listen to. Dillinger Four sounds as good at 192k as 320k to me .

I don't think you will get any complaints about EAC on this board but there have been many threads about what the best program is. I personally use the Rio music manager software that came with my Karma.