As a follow-up for those interested, I am posting a short debrief.

First of all, thank you to all who provided input and advice.

I ended up going with a conversion, for the following reasons:
- Cost
- Wanted exact same weight and operation/feel. I am teaching myself, two kids and perhaps my wife how to use this and wanted to simplify the training aspect. Heck, I had never even cleaned or stripped an AR-15 before.
- I do not own any optics, so there were no "old" or "passdown" optics to use on a dedicated 22. No passdown BUIS either!
- Target shooting/accuracy is not an issue for my family. We are wanting to shoot a lot of rounds and learn basic rifle handling and familiarity.

After checking to see what other conversion kits were available, and reading the reviews I could find, I went with a Target Master .22 conversion kit. It was about $75-$100 cheaper than CMMG.

We have put a little over 1,200 rounds through it, with only one (maybe two) jams. I am very pleasantly surprised.

Thanks again to everyone!