Need to Buy New Stove - Recommendations?

I will tell you what NOT to get -a Jenn Air! They used to have good appliances, and in our last house we had a fantastic Jenn Air stove from 2000. We moved into our current home in 2008 and purchased this stove then and it's AWFUL. It cooks fine, but when they switched over to electronic controls, they did a very bad job of it. The control panel shorts out all the time, and you have to order a new one and install it. If you can't do that yourself (luckily my husband can), then you have to pay someone to come do it. Because it's still under warranty, we get the panels free, but the minute the warranty expires, I'm buying something else! When you look our model and almost all of their electronic panel models up online at any site allowing comments, there are often pages of complaints about this issue.

I have a family of 6 with an extended family that includes 6 siblings, 22 nieces and nephews, and my parents. We are often all together and I am the chief cook (although my mom is the bottle washer!). I also have a small baking business that I run through my home. All that to say I bake and cook a LOT and couldn't live without my convection oven or 5 burners! It depends on how much you use your kitchen or plan to in the future. I'd say 5 is not too much and convection is a must. Basically "convection" means you can use all three or four racks at once since there is a heat fan that circulates heat at a constant temp inside the oven so that you can brown three or four sheets of cookies evenly, or bake 3 lasagnas or pizzas at the same time. best wishes!
K.

We had to replace ours in December (3 days before Christmas) -- after all of our research, we opted for the GE profile. They have gas and electric options. Convection is nice if you can afford the option :) We have it and I LOVE IT! Heats up in no time, cooks more evenly and things that are supposed to be crisp are crispier! We got the GE profile double oven with the small lower oven.

I've had 2 Sears ovens, and both have been great. The burners you described with the smooth top are fine. I have 4 on mine, 2 have both large or smaller settings. There is also a "warming" spot. The oven also has convection. I don't use it much, but my husband always wants to use it for EVERYTHING. haha

I probably would have actually gotten more use out of a 2nd smaller oven space (like for warming bread or baking potatoes when there is something else in the 'big' oven. Have you checked out any of the ones with 2 "ovens"?
The convection does cut down on the time things need to cook, but that isn't usually an issue for me. And I hesitate to use it for baking cakes and pies and things. Cookies is ok though.

We bought a glass stove from Sears at the mall.
Ours has 4 burners but one of the burners has the option of being either a big burner or a small one by the push of a button.

I really like using it. I have always been horrible about cleaning up spills after done cooking but now it is easier and makes me one to keep it cleaner. I really like the look of it.

in august i got a frigidaire gallery convection double oven/stove......oh mine is stainless & is absolutely smudge proof.....was rated high on consumer reports too.......a few months later 2 of my friends got the same one

Check out the reviews on the Sears site. We replaced all our appliances last month and went with Kenmores with fantastic reviews online. So far, so good with all of them.

We have gas right now and hate it. If we could go back to electric, I would go with the glass top for ease of cleaning.

A big tip is to stay away from stainless, if you're leaning that way at all. We just went all stainless and what a pain! Constant smudges to clean up. It was a whole lot easier with white appliances.

I just got a new Kitchen Aid slide in convection oven/electric cook top. It literally was just hooked up two days ago, so I have only cooked with it once so far. My old stove was gas on the cooktop and oven. I have to say, I LOVE the electric oven (convection option is cool- sped up the chicken nugget cooking process) so much more than gas. The cooktop looks pretty, but boy, it takes forever to heat up compared with my gas one! We did a ton of research and found that the Kitchen Aid was the most "bang for our buck".
Oh, and mine has 4 burners. A lot of the ones we looked at had a "warming" burners or something, but we didn't think they were necessary.

Added- I totally agree with the person below who said don't get stainless!! We just renovated our kitchen and my husband and I fought bitterly over stainless vs. black and I won with black. Black is so great at hiding all of the fingerprints and food....I'm really glad I stuck to my guns and insisted on black.