Revived to let everyone know I'm going with Hardieplank siding, complete new Hardiewrap, Hardieshakes, all Hardie trim, and even new vented Hardiesoffits. All done per Hardie requirements - joint flashing, finishing off drip edges, and caulking everywhere included.

The contractor and I crawled all over the house to try to estimate how much cedar would be needed to replace bad boards and install Hardietrim at corners and windows. Bottom line, estimate for cedar was a little more than half of the complete fixed-price fiber cement treatment with no guarantee of final cost or how well the underlying house wrap, etc., has stood up. Then, too, if something else deteriorates in the next few years we would need to rip off the new trim to fix it.

One thing came up that I need opinions on. We had assumed that colors would be pretty much as now, but when we "built" color models on the Hardie site, a surprise was how well white trim looked with some of the greyish fields. So to the best of my photoshop abilities I added white trim to the front (shadows prevented a full treatment) so it might look something like this:

Whaddya think? A plus here would be that AZEK or similar trim could be considered instead of Hardietrim, being much easier to work with and having less tendency to wick water. AZEK costs a little more, but would be made up by reduced labor.