Don't discount the Evo either. Yeah, try before buy if you can. The Evo is a versatile, fun board, not a noodle but def press-able for days. Maybe not so much for shredding big mountain stuff, but if you're on a smaller hill it can bomb whatever you like, park, kickers, trees, pow. It's a super fun deck
The main area I think it falls down is when it gets really badly chopped up, it's a bit soft to blast through the bigger bumps. Think places like Whistler, later in the day on a 20cm+ day... for that, yeah probably proto would be better