If I had it to do over again, with the products available today as opposed to 4 years ago, I might have gone with an all Really Right Stuff setup -legs & ball head. But RRS wasn't making nearly as much in the way of tripod legs a few years ago. Their newest catalog has even more products...
I have a couple tripods. One is an old Hakuba model. I don't remember what I paid for it; perhaps a couple hundred bucks. It worked fine with regular point and shoot digital cameras. When I moved up to using D-SLR cameras it really started showing its limitations. It didn't work so well for time...