He gets all misty eyed when he speaks of it, so it must be something special. After visiting the Meade website, I noticed that Schmidt-Newtonian telescopes were conspicuously absent from their lineup of reflectors. I'm not really sure why they dropped it, but my guess is it's a cost issue. Meade wants to be the biggest, best selling scopes around and achieving that goal means quantity. It costs too much to make these, so they stopped.
Forks are expensive.
Rule of thumb puts maximum mag at around 300x. Sometimes specific optics can give more or less, however. You'll need quality, anyway. It turns the giant greens, but details in cloud bands and contrast for shadow transits are nothing short of amazing. The standard blue, red, orange and green filters work too.