"you can't hide the oak grain and pits with paint!" He is correct. Put paste wood filler WILL fill the oak pores and allow a smooth finish. Once you get to bare wood you apply paste wood filler (Pore-o-pac by Behlans is one) is than applied to the wood and allowed to start to set before rubbing most of it off with burlap across the grain. If you are going to paint use natural or a light color filler. After the filler finishes drying you get to sand once again with fine grit to remove any excess filler on the surface. If you remove to much filler (or it shrinks excessively from being thinned to much) you may even need a second coat of filler. You can make ANY wood smooth as glass if you want to work at it. The prominent pores in oak furniture are a 'style' that omits paste wood filler. There are also finish styles that use contrasting or colored filler to emphasize the pores while leaving a smoother surface.

i think i would definitely paint the doors and door trim the white color. i would probably try to darken the stain color on the banisters and newel posts... possibly paint the spindles white, tho i am kindof tired of the white spindle look myself....

I much prefer the look of painted risers. I have found that scuff marks seem to depend a lot on the kind of paint you use. In our last house, we pulled up carpet and painted the risers with a latex semi-gloss paint. They scuffed horribly and I was constantly repainting them (because they scuffed so bad I couldn't get them clean). In this house, which was painted with Ben Moore OIL based semi-gloss, the stair risers hardly ever scuff. Same people, same shoes -- only difference is the paint. Now, we can no longer get oil paint in our state and our stair area really needs repainted (the walls are wood paneled and painted in the same paint as the risers) so I started putting Zinsser 123 over the oil paint in preparation for repainting it with latex. I got interrupted, so only a few steps have the 123. They too are scuffing horribly. They're only primer, so I wouldn't expect it to hold up, but still - it's amazing the difference between scuff level after just a few days. I'm planning to repaint with Cabinet Coat by Insul-X, which is the toughest latex trim paint I have found. It has held up well on my baseboards so I'm hoping it will be good on the risers. If not, I guess I could make an out-of-state trip to smuggle in some oil paint, LOL!

Darker is BETTER. Like in sewing seams on a garment, it is better to do DARKER with the tread than it is lighter. Jacobean stain has been used successfully to remove the red from red oak. If don't properly, the Jacobean stain (like water popped treads) will come VERY close to the tone/colour or the DARKER stripe in the feature wall. To keep the country theme, you can have the RISERS painted WHITE. The WHITE will help the Jacobean 'pull off' this change. A small bit of separation from the floor colour, the tread colour and the feature wall colour is all that is needed to FOOL the eye into thinking everything is tone on tone on tone. Water pop + Jacobean stain + ONE COAT of finish. Remember: the FINISH is what will add more yellow/orange (oil based or oil modified poly) or NOT (water based poly....like Bona Mega One or Traffic or Traffic HD). Find out the FINISH for the treads. You will be picking blind if you do not have a coat of finish over the stain.