Welcome to the booth!
Now for your original question. I would recommend getting an
ETC element, it has all the features that you are looking for and looks professional enough that your boss should be pleased. And as said before the learning curve is not that huge,
ETC has great training resources available.
Now for the lights and
truss; I agree with what was said before about putting motors on the
truss. Not only does that allow you to refocus, add fixtures, and troubleshoot much easier, you can also then change the height of the
trim to add
effect to the show. For example for one show you might want the US
truss farther down so that you can use some of the fixtures on that
truss as audience blinders. But for a slower show you might not want that so you could just raise it back up.
I would look into using both recommendations of
LED fixtures.
ETC D40's for your DS front light
truss and Chauvet PARs for your US backlight
truss. That way you can have the 7x Color
system for your front light (which will give you much better
face light) and still not brake the bank completely. I would also sit down with your boss and discuss possibly putting some lights/effects on
stage (as mentioned before). I would think about either some
LED strips (think
Coemar or Chauvet) or an
array of
LED pars or even some movers (though that opens up a whole other world of crazyness, and you might want to mount those on the
truss), but I really think that you will find your self wanting effects on
stage.
As for whether or not to get an
Opto Splitter; I say just get it. Even if you end up running
DMX between the two trusses you could still use the
Opto to
send an extra
line to the
stage and the trusses or something along those lines. With an
Enttec Opto not being very expensive you might as well buy it when you can!
Also don't forget that you can
daisy chain the
power on most Chauvet fixtures as well as the
ETC D40s (10 on a 15amp
circuit, not sure how many Chauvet fixtures but it should be similar) that way you can run just one
power run to each
truss and keep your cabling really clean.