The best forum is www.astromart.com. Cloudynights.com is OK but suffers from a few defects. For one thing it is over-moderated, people with strong opinions are often censored. For another thing is overly weighted with newbies in people on a tight budget. A better forum is Astromart. At your budget level you owe it to yourself.
There is a one-time joining fee of $12. If you go for a long period without logging on, or change your email, you may have to rejoin again.
What you get: It's the New York Stock Exchange of used equipment. You can learn tons just by cruising the ads. There is also an archive of old ads so you can get good price data before you buy used. What you also get: several dozen discussions group. The one you want is "Equipment." (You're beyond the group for newbies).
I'm not going to offer you any advice. I've got several telescope configurations which I use on a variety of German Equatorial and one alt-azimuth dob. I have sunk four or five times what you've budgeted into the hobby over the years. The used market is a real blessing, helps save on a lot of critical items. It also means that if you don't like anything you can get most of your money back out of it.
Now, the astromart discussion groups are the best on the Internet, and here's why. We have a zillion Yahoo! groups on astronomy, but they are bad sources for information because if you go on a refractor group everyone loves refractors (for example); and even the supposedly ecumenical "telescopes" group is weighted to towards Newtonians in dobson configurations (almost any group that accommodates beginners will be); that's why you got the load of nonsense about charts from another post (I can go anywhere with or without a computer; charts are fine, I have several Atlases and sky software, and digital setting circles, so I am familiar with all the basic systems. A nice computer is hard to beat).
Take these things with you to Astromart to chew over:
reliability: go-to systems are more complex than non-go to. You can have tracking on a German equatorial, and pointing with a computer; this is called DSC systems. Argo Navis is the leading dsc bar none.
The computer: the options are plug in your laptop (the Software Bisque or Sky Map Pro, and other options); have a hand paddle with controls (most go-to systems) or a side attached box where you push the telescope to the object and stop where the system tells you to stop.
Environmental requirements: Working in extreme cold (under 20F) places different requirements. Dew is another killer. SCTs are extremely vulnerable to dew; refractors are "fairly vulnerable", Newtonians are most impervious.
Tracking: every configuration these days can track. For Dobson designs there is stellarCAT, almost all German equatorials track, that is their purpose in life.
Field rotation: notwithstanding that all telescopes can track, not all tracking is the same. Equatorial mounts maintain the same relative position to the sky. If you have a star in the center and a star "on the left" in your field of view, an hour later it will still be that way. On an alt-azimuth tracking system (dobs and fork mounted SCTs, usually) there will be field rotation. The star on the left will "move" to another position: over 12 hours it will move 180 degrees. Still in the same field of view, the star in the center still remain centered, but if you were doing a long exposure image, the star that has changed its rotational position will be a streak. A long galaxy would rotate in the field of view of an alt-az mounted scope like a plane propeller in super slow motion. I don't want to explain the geometry here but the basic schtick is: equatorial mounts=no field rotation, alt-azimuth=field rotation.
Photography requirements. The possible configurations are too many to discuss here. Do you want to image planets and the moon or galaxies and nebulae? The type of telescope you buy depends on your choice. For planets buy a Celestron 9.25 SCT. You want the combination of aperture and long focal length. For big nebulae get a small short focal length apochromatic refractor. For beginners in general short focal length instruments are more tolerant of tracking issues that bedevil newcomers. You'll have to decide between a ccd system and a digital single lens reflex (both used for deep sky) or a web cam (for planets) or get both. Stuff to talk about.
Stability: Not all configurations have the same stability in wind.
Other: Short exposure photography is more tolerant of different equipment configurations (short exposures reduce the importance of field rotation and jitters in the mount). As you prolong your exposure time you get more demanding of the mount.
Mount: In general the mount is extremely critical for any kind of imaging and you should plan on spending more on the mount than the optic. In terms of stability, weight combined with length, short fat and ugly is best. SCTs (short length, lots of aperture) and fast refractors (short focal length refractors) are the instruments of choice (as a rule). Newts are extremely cost effective but keeping them stable on a tracking mount is difficult.
One of the problems in your query is that you want one telescope to do it all, and that places contradictory requirements on the discussion. The best thing for visual observing, as one person here put it, is 8 to 10 inches (or more). The best thing for a beginner in photography is something that tolerates errors in tracking but introduces very little false color. The 80 to 102mm refractors that fit that bill are expensive, however, and offer more limited satisfaction on deep sky (but actually there's a lot to be done with a 102mm refractor and just an eyepiece). It might be that a Celestron 8" or a Celestron 9.25 on the comes-with German equatorial mount will be what you want for visual; if you buy a 60mm refractor on the side, you might be able to get your feet wet with nebula imaging. I agree with another post that "imaging without frustration" is more of a $10 to $20k proposition but it can be done on $4k. Hell I've taken pictures of the moon through my $200 family camera: for $15 I bought an adapter that screws it on to my eyepiece. Not good on other stuff, though.
Other things to think about: Meade no longer has a rep for quality. It is near bankruptcy. Check the archives on Yahoo! sct-user group. Planet imaging requires huge hard drives because you're in effect taking home movies and then processing them using statistical software like registax. Vixen is probably the best intermediate brand name, best in terms of quality reliability (mounts and optics). Losmandy is good too (mounts); Celestron is much better than Meade at this point. I generally stay away from anything from mainland China if there is any possibility of doing so. (Vixen is Japanese and outsources some low end stuff to China, but they are very serious about quality control; you take your chances. The high end names are all beyond your budget but include Takahashi (optics), TEC (optics), Astro-Physics (for mounts; their telescopes can only be bought used); Planewave (optics); RCOS (optics) and so on.
AFTER you have made some critical equipment choices, the various Yahoo groups are excellent places to get support and information. People will share how they have solved various problems. You won't get the religious wars over what's best as much because those decisions will have been made.
So those are the issues you should bring up on the forum of your choice, but in general, your best forum will be Astromart.