Gary, I would say to go with the "mission" and not worry about your personal flight time. No matter which way you choose, there are now several resources where you can get some heavy instruction in-type before you fly your own.
By the time you first get some instruction in an RV, and then carefully(apprehensively?) fly off your first 25 or 40 hours in either the -7 or -9 that you choose, it will by then feel as comfortable to you as your living room couch no matter which.
The only thing I question is your wanting to go with a taildragger. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's no absolute advantage in doing so, and as a low time pilot (me too), you might want to check ahead of time with some aviation insurance companies to see what their requirements are for insuring a pilot with a taildragger who has very little TD experience. It might be a shocker to you and cause you to re-evaluate your mission for the aircraft.
I'm not exactly a "high time" pilot either, but my mission is mostly intended to be fast cross country sitting next to, not in front of, my wife. So that, and the fact that I have no tail wheel time, made the choice of the -7A for me really obvious.
What also helped my decision was that even though I have no interest in airbatics (well, maybe an occasional roll to recover a lost pencil from the floor
), I like the idea of the higher G-rating of the -7.
That sort of shows the genious of R.V. in that he didn't design just one or two aircraft, he designed a family of aircraft that are all similar to each other but different in subtle ways.
I know you're looking for opinions from others, but you really need to decide for your own reasons. Or, if you feel lucky, roll a pair of dice until either a 3 or 4 or 7 or 8 or 9 (or 10!) comes up first. Then pick up your phone in one hand and a credit card in the other and get started.
Vern
RV7-A