Easier to paint before. Uses more paint, but less labor. Less chance of splotches too. On the other hand when I remodelled my old house I didn't paint before. So few areas that needed paint around the cabinets that it wasn't worth it and I painted myself so labor was just my time.

If you're doing floor installation yourself and you're laying unfinished wood or tiles, there's a lot less cutting and piecing and it's faster if you can just lay and lay and lay without interference. And you can topfinish the room cleanly all the way to the walls, again without touchy little areas that need awkward kneeling and close vision and special attention. Also, you can more easily reconfigure the kitchen later--remove a portion of cabs and there's still an intact floor there. Hint from the sadder but wiser: If you're doing red oak and if you're sorting pieces beforehand so that you can isolate or omit the odd colored and wild grain ones and feature the calm ones in the major areas [I yanked out what I termed "clown" pieces to use up in the closet and under the cabs] be sure you have measured off the projected cab positions ten times over before you start. DH made a measuring error--didn't read the cab layout properly and figure how it related to the blueprint. I have three courses of clowns right in a prominent place and, naturally, some of the nicest boards are under the peninsula. It wasn't until the cabs were installed that I realized how my strategy had backfired. New Gel Mat covers it.

nh baskets, you have a really beautiful kitchen. There are 2 advantages to doing the granite backsplash first. 1. the ability to change the beadboard to something else in the future. 2. The beadboard butts into the granite and no little crevices are left. We have 2 different types of beadboard in our kitchen. The stained beadboard on the sides of some of our cabinets (beadboard all ready on the cabinets before the granite backsplash was installed) and the dyi painted beadboard backsplash we installed about a year after the kitchen was done. I prefer having the beadboard butt into the granite. Here's the counter next to the fridge. Here's the painted beadboard behind the coffee maker:

I'd do demo, paint, counters if I could spare the down time. Paint, demo, counters if I couldn't. I don't see that it makes a whole lot of difference, but I think painting the top rail would be a bit easier without the counters in place.