If you've never grown fruit trees before then starting out small is the way to go. When I started I went with 4 apple and two pears. I learned about growing fruit by attending classes put on by the local university extension office. I've grafted a lot of my own trees from these classes. I have learned a lot from Tony Dembski at Maple Valley Orchards in Gillett WI put a lot of the classes on. Check your local county or university extn. I attached a link if you want to see if Tony has any trees left to sell this year. Here is a link that might be useful: apple trees

Please read this in a good natured tone of voice. I am not being snarky. To someone whose idea of gardening is to buy a condo and let the landscaping crew mow the lawns, a fruit tree would look complicated. Growing organic fruit can be a challenge. I gave up and I spray. The upside to that is I actually get to eat fruit. When I grow fruit trees, I am producing food for my family and I literally spend less time working on the trees than it takes me to drive to the market and buy tasteless, under-ripe, expensive fruit from the produce department. Thanks to the internet and especially thanks to this forum, all the information about how to grow fruit trees is readily available. Seriously, it is simply paint-by-the-numbers to get started. Follow simple instructions. Get a couple of easy trees to begin and then you can get fancier as you learn. I'm still not ready to espalier. My veggie garden is a lot more work. I only have to dig one time to plant the tree. Did I mention that tomato horn worms are close to being the grossest thing on the planet? I'm going to agree that berries can be easy, as long as you like feeding the birds. Pruning brambles can be intimidating. They fight back. I find grapes to be easy, but I know that they take a lot of spraying in climates different than mine. The simple truth is that some people like to garden and some don't. For those who don't, that's why they build condos.

You do not need to be above the tree to prune. You could have a branch that is 10' tall and cut it at 4'. You certainly wouldn't need to get on a ladder to make the 4' cut just because the branch is 10'. All the trees you mention except for the cherry, which you will probably kill doing what you want because they don't handle constant or heavy pruning well (and it sounds like you are going to cut a large central leader to make an open vase, which is why my old cherry tree split about 15 years after I had that idea), and the guava (which I just don't know about) fruit on last year's wood. Once you get your basic tree structure down your pruning will be replacing old branches when they get too big and heading back new branches to encourage fruiting and strength. You can bend the branches down to do the heading back and the branch replacement will be done at whatever level you decide your fruiting branches will come from. That level could be radiating from a central leader or it could be a system of scaffolds. I see a lot of overgrown "new wood" fruit trees and the reason is people didn't train them with the idea of branch replacement and to continue getting fruit they need to let the tree continue to get larger and larger. Let's say you decide your base will be cut at 4' and you will allow the trees to go no more than 10'. If the trees grow 12" a year or you head them back so they grow no more than 12" a year that means you will be replacing branches every 6 years. I don't know about zone 9 but 6 years is not a unmanageable branch. If it is you could decide to replace every 4 or 5 year branch and have an 8'-9' tree. If you are really stuck on having your trees only be 6' (which like I said above, there is no pruning reason to have to have them at head height to prune them since you will be removing well below the final height and can bend whips down to head them back) you would be cutting them off after every 2nd year. I'm not sure your trees would go for that, they may decide they don't have enough tree compared to root to bother trying to populate and growing tree is more important. I have a McIntosh that hates being espaliered to 5' and it's always trying to grow more tree instead of getting heavy with fruit. You may have to do some root pruning to make them satisfied with 6' of tree or do some other stress/extra dwarfing techniques to cause them to bear heavy so they don't have the energy to make more tree.

Really. I understand trying to do things 'on the cheap' - believe me, I'm tight. But you don't want to do seedling fruits of these species. Seedling apples/pears will eventually become very big trees, unless you're prepared to do constant, diligent pruning - fine if you've got unlimited space, but the typical residential yard can't really accomodate more than one standard apple, and you'll be waiting 10, 12, 20 years for them to grow through their juvenile period before you ever find out if the fruits they will produce are tasty enough to eat. You'll be far better off choosing grafted specimens of varieties you like on a rootstock suitable for your site. A grafted/budded selection will bear fruit in less than half the time you'd be waiting for your seedling to begin fruiting - and you'll know what the fruits will be like beforehand. Pomegranates are easy to grow from seed, but typically, most seedling pomegranates do not produce top quality fruit. Better to purchase named-variety selections, propagated from cuttings. Most poms are zone 8(maybe 7) hardy - zone 6 is gonna be real iffy - but you might well succeed with some of the Russian selections, like Kazake and Salavatski. Cherries - I dunno. Hard to beat a budded/grafted variety like Montmorency, though I've seen some seedlings of that one that were pretty close, in fruit quality, to the original.