After reading through all of this, my suggestion, for what it's worth, is to come down to Florida and just take a cavern class. Don't combine it with Intro. Get a good instructor who will teach a rigorous cavern class and see what you think before you really decide if you want to continue down this path. Couple of reasons why:
1. What you learn in cavern is the foundation for everything that you learn all the way through full cave. In fact, more than that, you learn maybe 80% of the skills and techniques in the cavern class. You'll have more than enough to work on and practice after your cavern class without throwing Intro into it as well. You won't be bored just doing cavern and you'll learn a lot!
2. You can do cavern (and Intro, too, for that matter - don't want to start a debate on this!) in basically your open water gear with a single tank. Your instructor will work with you to modify your configuration a little, but it's not a huge investment in gear at the cavern level.
3. You'll get a little bit of a sense of what cave diving's like, enough hopefully for you to know if you want to continue to the next level.
4. If you DO decide to go on to Intro at some point, I think you'll REALLY appreciate having had time to practice the skills you learned in cavern in between. Having that cavern certification opens up a lot of diving opportunities, at least in N. Florida, and there are tons of cool caverns to check out and practice your skills in.
5. You'll meet people in your cavern class, and you'll meet a good instructor, and the people you meet will be good people to talk to about cavern and cave diving. The next time you come down for your Intro class you'll know some people and be a little more comfortable with the "setup" down here (where everyone gets air, where some of the different springs are, where everyone eats, blah, blah, blah) and you'll have some folks to do some tuneup dives with before you jump right into Intro. Your instructor will be a better resource for these kinds of questions in the future than this board, for sure, and hopefully you'll meet some good divers in your cavern class as well.
Well I can't think of any more reasons specifically, but I feel pretty strongly that you wouldn't regret this course of action. The caves aren't going anywhere, and cave diving classes (and cave dives, for that matter) SUCK when you're beyond where you're comfortable being. You'll be so task loaded trying to run a reel and maintain your buoyancy and use the correct finning techniques all at the same time, that you may very well NOT be comfortable heading into a cave, and that's NOT fun.
So my advice, go slow and have fun with it. Do it in N. Florida, not only for the instruction but because you'll meet people down here and it'll be more fun the next time you come down for Intro, and the next time you come down after that, and the next time you...
FWIW.
Brian
