@Shanej,

FWIW: Your Roam 1 is almost 2.5x the value of what I'm currently almost-committed to buying, (the Escape 3), so your "cheap" suntour suspension is probably a lot "less-cheap" than what I'm referring to.
@both,

The suspension was the first "problem" that I tackled while researching bikes, and the one I've spent the most time on.

My research started with some google searches, leading me to various discussion groups, this one included. Almost unanimously, to my great surprise, the seasoned bikers told people to avoid suspensions in our price range. One such thread is This one. I continued to search google, in an effort to redeem the suspension, and was not able to. This surprised me; like most non-enthusiast consumers, I've been fairly successfully indoctrinated that all non-cheap bikes have a suspension.

I ended up gathering ideas from various sites, and wrote a Question on the Stack Exchange network, which has been getting a bit of traffic. Arguments that I levied against the suspension included weight, add'l maintenance, point of failure, and that they are unnecessary for my use-case. Once again, the responses were almost exclusively against using a suspension.

In addition to this thread, I have a secondary discussion going on /r/bicycling and yet again, people are advocating the rigid fork:





and so on.

So, all in all, I have little choice but to go with what the majority is telling me and risk the no-suspension option.