Whether XT32 is as good or not is mostly a matter of personal preference, and is subjective. There notable differences in their approach, for example, AARC apparently eq bass such that it would ramp up towards the low end whereas Audyssey would aim to flatten it the best it could but you can do a custom curve yourself using the Audyssey Editor App. Both can EQ without down sampling to 48 kHz, but when it is done on board the device, there may not be enough processing power to do it at higher sampling frequencies, so all D&M AVRs/AVPs, even the flag ship models do down sample to 48 kHz when running Audyssey. AARC, the AVM would down sample to 96 kHz for the digital inputs and 48 kHz if analog inputs are used. To a lot of people, 48 or 96 kHz is academic, makes no difference in sound quality.
There are probably more positive reviews on AARC than XT32, but I think that had a lot to do with hearsay started after Harman did a shoot out between 5 or 6 REQ systems including an earlier version of Audyssey, and in that shoot out, the main thing that caused MultEQ to score low was the fact that it tended to level/flatten the bass, forced a mid range compensation (aka BBC dip), and EQ all the way to 20 kHz. It turned out a lot of people just didn't like the resulting sound signature. Note that Harman ranked them according to their scores, but never identify them, though most guessed Audyssey was among the one(s) with the lowest score. All 3 factors have been dealt with to some extents with the introduction of XT32 and the Editor App, but I am not aware of any such re-match/review conducted by any credible/reputable group.
I don't know how Anthem defines "truly balance", so no comment. We do know the Denon AVP-A1HDCI is truly balance but it was listed for $7,500. ADTG had one, that failed after 8 years. I wouldn't expect a $3,000 unit, AVP or power amp, to be fully/truly end to end balance, without sacrificing something else along the line, but that's just my opinion.
