AV Receiver Underpowered?

I did something similar with my Denon *BUT*, I also had to upgrade to a Denon that had pre-out (don't buy an amp and be disappointed you can actually hook it up). I had to go up to a 3313 to get pre-out (nothing lower had pre-out) and bought an Emotiva amp. I had my earlier Denon hooked up with bi-amp, which does push some more power to the speakers (at least for stereo). Switching to Emotiva xpa-5 to power the surround system made a HUGE difference (no longer bi-amped though).

I contemplated an XPA 3 instead of XPA 5 when buying my amp since getting more power to the surrounds wasn't a really high priority. I do use the 5.1 for movies and tv a lot, but the surrounds are so close and so small, that they don't really need a whole lot of power. I'm not an expert by any means on what is best for your speakers, but it may not be that big of a deal to go with fewer channels with more power driven by the dedicated amp (and may be better if the fronts can use more power than 80 watts, so maybe even consider xpa-3). But I also would have been using the Denon to power the surrounds and zone 2. If you get the UMC-200, you need an amp for all channels, including your second zone.

I think Emotiva has a 30 day return policy which is nice since they don't have showrooms (as far as I know).