I here you; it is insane what they charge for some things. Name recognition really pushes up the price too. I think "back in the day" which is maybe 8 years ago Rigol got some recognition for having Agilent rebrand a couple of Rigol scopes for their lowest end models. Another scope I'm also a fan of is the Picoscope - I really had some reservations that it was a serious tool being a USB interfaced scope as many USB scopes are not so good, but the couple of Picoscopes I have a really outstanding. The most bang for the buck are models 2206B, or better yet the 2207B or 2406B/2407B.
Your Rigol should come with trial licenses for all features (except bandwidth I think) so you'll get serial decoding, more memory, more triggers, etc. for awhile, but then they will expire. I think though unless something has changed that you can just enter your serial number into a code generator and it will let you double the bandwidth and extend those features permanently.
My take is that scopes are great for analog work, but I'm not a huge fan of the MSO concept of using them for digital stuff. I don't find their decoding to be easy to deal with compared to something like a Saleae logic analyzer which gives a single timeline capture instead of hundreds of captures. Saleae has a deal where you can get their equipment at a decent discount if it is for private or educational use, etc., I think.