I should have noted that no cabinetry is involved...the hood stands alone.

I struggled with how to run the crown on the wall with my rangehood between two windows. On this thread where I was asking for help, you can see a few different pics of crown and hood treatment. Maybe one of these pics will help. Here's what I ended up doing. No crown. I will, when I pick tile, run it eurosplash style on the whole hood wall. Here is a link that might be useful: Pics of hood-crown treatment

Our situation is a little different. We are installing new cherry (light/medium stain) cabinets ceiling height with 5" crown with same finish. We intend to put 5" crown in dining area of room (kitchen/dining area is 20x12 and each are is approx. 10x12). We plan to paint dining area crown white. Both the custom cabinet rep and my son, who has many years of remodeling experience, claim this is commonly done. In fact, I have a 4' break in kitchen crown over a door that will also have the white painted crown. That seemed odd to me but both assured me this is common. I purchased raw crown from cabinet company for dining area to assure that the profile matches which is important. My son and cabinet rep had different opinions about joining the painted and stained crown. The cabinet will install the cabinets and stained crown and my son the rest of the crown. The cabinet rep suggested mitering the corners but my son said he was old school and would use coping saw to join the crown. I hope this is helpful. Best wishes

A cabinet maker might go to all of the trouble to sand and restain dinged pieces if he's the one who built the cabinets, but there is no way your average cabinet installer would ever do that. No one is as careful as a homeowner who has all the time in the world to be very careful with their own stuff. A paid installer who has another job to move onto quickly will remove the moldings, yes, but if you want the dings to end up on the molding rather than the cabinets, you'd better plan on reordering all of the molding. Cabinets are not like off the rack clothing that you can take back to Macy's and return if you don't like it. If you change your mind after you sign off on the design, purchase and install the cabinets, then anything different will cost you. Installation is the last step in the chain and it constitutes complete acceptance of the already approved design. This is yet another reason why it's very important to be there when your cabinets are installed. If the OP had been there when the first piece of crown went up and didn't like it, it would have been an easy matter to put that on hold, order the solid stock, pay a bit extra to the installer, and reschedule him for just the crown. In a cheap cabinet line and a cheap labor market, the changes discussed would be $1100-$1200. In a medium high cabinet line in an expensive labor market, you could be talking 4-5K. So, I'd say that 2K is on the low side for the changes. A good compromise for all concerns would be Kompy's suggestion that the OP pay the actual costs. However, don't think that it will magically save you hundreds of dollars. Cabinet markups aren't as high as most people seem to think!