I’ve used both at work and Symphobia 1 gets WAY more use than Symphobia 2. That being said, it really depends on what your end goals are. Are you trying to simply add orchestra to your pallet, or are you looking to get full into film scoring and need tons of control. Symphobia sounds great because its not broken down into individual instruments, but sections. This is nice for those of use who need to work fast and get something that sounds good very quickly. And as you said, its great for epic style compositions.
However, for my own personally compositions (not on a deadline) I never use Symphobia. Why? Because I want control over each member of the orchestra when writing my own pieces. So it really all depends on your goals. If you want something quick and easy that sound great, go Symphobia. If you are looking for flexibility and control, I use to recommend VSL (if you have good mixing chops) but with upstart companies like Cinesamples, cinematic strings, orchestral tools, Spitfire, etc there are more choices out there. So make sure you really research before deciding, as $1000 is quite a lot of money to spend on something you might regret (EastWest I’m looking at you!)
p.s. if you didn’t know of http://www.try-sound.com you should check them out. They offer some libraries (not all) on their servers where you can demo them over the internet. A great way to demo sample libraries before buying.