If music is important to you then it may be worth going for a seperate stereo amp and using it to power you fronts, using the pre-out from your reciever for movie watching. This obviuosly complicates things a little with regard to remotes and connections but would give better performance.
You could got with a Nad 352 amp for the stereo as it is considered very good (better than pretty much any multicahannel reciever) and has decent power and then either stick with your current amp or move over to a nad reciever too, so to keep everything in the family so to speak. This would probably still be below your 2k budget by quite a bit and would alow you to buy a new high end DVD player (although the denon seems more than decent) or just keep the money.
If music is less important to you, then you could go with a multichannel power amp instead, there are a fair amount of these arround and you could have your pick of them for 2k (well upto a certain leauge anyway).
Audio lab kit is ment to be very decent and good with music too, 7.1 or bridge the fronts for 5.1
http://www.hifibitz.co.uk/product.asp?id=4496
Heres a nad power amp, and there power is quoated at what it can deliver
http://www.hifibitz.co.uk/product.asp?id=2612
The good thing about going with a power amp is that amps haven't really evolved that much in recent years, in comparision to HC tech. This means you could buy yourself a good amp now and in the future all you need is a decent processor for all the latest technology, meaning you could potenitaly have a new highend system for half the cost.
By all means you should demo if you can and with high end stuff like this some dealers even alow you to demo the stuff in your home to give you a better idea of what you want.