Hey no problem! I like to help out, some people have been very kind to me, I'm just paying it forward.
I use the Botanicare line. It's really cheap and works very well. The 3-2-4 formula for veg and the 1-5-4 formula for flower. I get 0.5g/w easy and all different strains ranging from 90% indica to 90% sativa are happy. I don't have to supplement with anything other than some calmag (also Botanicare). I use RO water to keep things simple, and because my tap water is 300ppm and kills plants. So, I fill a 5 gallon bucket up to the bottom of a 6" net pot lid, which is about 3.5 gallons of water, and add a fixed amount of nutes and a pH up solution I made (I took some potassium carbonate pH powder, 10g for a one liter bottle of RO water). It makes it really easy, no fiddling with pH meters, so it's quick work. If you're interested I can provide some of the ratios I use for young plants and monsters in flower. There seems to be no need to push ppms really high, with 800ppm or so I was at 0.5g/w with no training and only one plant under a big light. You should've seen that beast, there were 14 foot long colas on it and it took up an entire 4x4ft tent. The plants in hydro grew easily 3x faster and looked healthier than anything I've seen in soil.
The biggest advantage of hydro though IMO is that it makes problems so much easier to fix. In soil, if you have a pH problem, you have to spend all day flushing the soil, whereas with hydro you just dump the bucket and refill. In soil, if you have a nutrient deficiency, you have to try to diagnose it - is it lockout, what formula can I use to fix it, am I even idetnifying the deficiency properly, etc... and by the time you figure it out it's harvest time and the plant's in shit shape... with hydro you again, just dump the bucket, refill, and it puts on 2-4" in 24-48 hours and greens up. And then the pests! I spent months battling root aphids with everything under the sun while in soil, and I was very diligent, probably 40 hours of work a week fighting them, just crazy. When I switched to DWC it was over in a week or two.
DWC is less work too, you can get away wih leaving the plants alone for days or even weeks if you have to travel because there's jut so much water in there. But it's best to switch buckets every 2 weeks when they're small, and every week when they're big (roots filling the whole bucket).
The risk of root rot is exaggerated, so long as the water isn't 80F and so long as you don't wait a month to swap the buckets (don't wait more than two weeks) it shouldn't ever happen, and if it does happen you can kill it with phosphonates (a fungicide you can buy at hydro shops).
The risk of a plant dying from a failed pump is also exaggerated, I once forgot to turn a pump back on with that monster I mentioned earlier in late flower so it sat there with no aeration for over 12 hours on a warm summer night (OMFG) but when I checked on it it was fine. No sign anything ever even happened.
I've thought of trying to keep my genetics by doing cuttings like you suggested, I'm going to consider doing that for sure. 
). I don't know if I will ever take cuts again because the risk of them bringing pest/disease is much higher and not worth the chance (unless you absolutely trust the source of the cutting).