@wyerstuff, Genesis themes are great if you are comfortable with techie stuff, or if you will be using one of the themes out of the box. We’ve used both Genesis and Emil’s Responsive theme and both are excellent – but for very different purposes and use cases. Emil’s Responsive theme is pretty easy to figure out and adopt (once you know the basics of WordPress at least); whereas Genesis allows you to — potentially — do a helluva lot more, however it has a very steep learning curve IMO if you need to make changes to the look-and-feel of your site.
Also note that not all of the Genesis themes are responsive. I think you’re smart to have that as a key criteria for your site, given how much mobile/tablet stuff is growing.
Anyway just my $0.02 as someone who’s recently been diving into WP and has gone in both directions that you’re considering.
