I'd be interested to hear what your friends say about the transmission. I believe it was edmunds.com where I read the reviews for the Rogue. One guy only had 2553 miles and needed a brand new transmission.
We looked into the Subaru Forrester, but we are looking at used cars under $19,000 with less than 30,000 miles on them and we could not find any Forresters in that range. There are cheaper Forresters, but they all have about 45 to 60 thousand miles on them already. Plus, my wife doesn't like the styling
Of course, I'm the one doing all the research and she just picks out the ones that look nice.