A couple things,
People are always so against refurb. Iused to be as well, until I actually had a refurb a few items. Factory refurbs are not like refurbs that you buy on ebay where some guy buys mass market broken units, fixes them in his basement, and then sells you the unit still sticky from the mountain dew and cheatos he was consuming. My point? For all intents and purposes the refurb units can and should be considered new. In many cases you are actually getting a new unit that has just been placed in lesser packaging to save resources. Refurbs aren't bad.
As to the OP's question, it sounds to me that if you are ready to go with a "lesser phone" there is more to this story than you claim. Why not just get a WORKING evo? Plenty of people have units that work just fine. If you are trying to use this to your advantage to get a different phone because you don't like the EVO, you probably won't get very far.
Just my two cents!