A couple of thoughts:

1. If you find that upturned bar ends is what you need for comfort, what sort of fit are you expecting from a road bike?

2. A 9 speed road cassette (like 11-27 or 11-25) will give you a narrow range of easy/mid gears that are closely spaced too allow fast spinning without big jumps between gears

3. Although a mountain bike will never be a road bike, with the right gears and properly inflated road tires it can be much more, at the expense of 10% weight and 0.5% speed penalties.

My experience with MTBs set up to work as hybrids or RBs is that they are close enough to peak performance so that an 'upgrade' to a road bike will actually make not too big a difference. I have seen many people ride MTBs with skinny hard tires on group road rides and have no trouble keeping up. On the same rides with the same groups I have seen many people on lightweight carbon bikes fall off the back. It's not the bike - it's the motor that matters.