personally the lcd / crt comparrison in my opinion isn't as black and white as people think it is anymore. I'm on a 19in Trinitron at work, and the display is nice, clear, crisp. The profile of the monitor isn't that bad : and it obviously handles many different applications fine : runs windows at 1600x1200 currently since that's the rez i have it set to.
my 2005fp from dell is at home, and i love that thing. If i had one at work, i might never leave ( :Q ). Running 1680x1050 was kinda wierd, and still is for some games (not used to the widescreen yet) but i gotta tell you. When viewing text on that monitor, it puts the trintron to shame. In face : in most applications it gives the crt a run for it's money. Even in WoW, CS:S, WIII, UT2k4 i have not noticed any ghosting (though i think i have seen some streaking a couple times trying to reproduce it has proved difficult).
I think if you view lcd's as a 'step back' you need to either a) get out of the year 2000 and come join the rest of us in 2005, or b) perhaps stop being a crt fanboy?
Crt's are still quite viable and admittantly better in some area's, but not by the margin you are thinking OP.