The Lamy Safari should get some sort of award. It's tied, in my book, with the Waterman Phileas as being the best bang for the buck in the fountain pen world. Amazing quality for the price. It's a really good pen, but not a great one.
I'll echo PB's first suggestion. The Sailor 1911 is a superb writer. As far as I can tell, no one offers smoother nibs out of the box than Sailor. They're very well constructed with good feeds, excellent inner caps, and decent converters. I've got both a full-size and the mid-size, and they're both simply stellar pens.
I'm very partial to Pelikans, and have quite a few of them, both modern and antique. They're spendy, but you can often find really good used ones, sometimes fully restored, sometimes in just excellent original condition. Older ones have cork pistons, and these sometimes get dry and brittle, requiring replacement, but newer ones are durable rubber. The Pelikans are not quite as smooth, stock, as the Sailors, but they generally have just the right feel and ink flow to suit me. I actually like a bit of tooth in the nibs. But, what really makes them my first choice when I grab a pen is the piston fillers. They hold a good supply of ink, especially the larger ones. Additionally, their inner cap is superb. I can leave one of my Pelikans sitting for months, pick it up, and start writing with it instantly. The Sailors are almost as good.
The Souverain series is available in several sizes, from the diminutive 300 series to the massive (and expensive) 1000. The nibs are interchangeable, and there are a couple of guys who can suppl you with customisation to turn it into your dream pen. I like John Mottishaw (nibs.com), but Richard Binder is also highly regarded for his nib work.
If you buy any pen from nibs.com, John will set the feed according to your preference, which is nice. You can also look through the various brands he has on offer. He's a picky guy, and has been in the pen repair end of things long enough to know what's good and what's not.
I've had a lot of cheap Chinese pens. Some of them write very well, some of them have been dreadful. I've done mods on some of them to improve them, and they've actually ended up being very good writers. But, the absolutely worst thing about every one of them (I've had about a dozen different ones) is that their inner cap is useless, and the nibs dry out in a matter of days. As an experiment, in fact, I filled one, capped it, and let it sit for a couple weeks. Nearly all the ink in the converter had evaporated, and it took a thorough cleaning to get the thing to write again. Cheap, but not recommended unless you just like to play with them.
There's no substitute for a nice pen, and that's what Jesse was asking for. I've used Pelikan and Mont Blancs, and they write nice and feel like quality. I know Jesse a bit and was trying to offer him an alternative to spending more, in case he was so inclined. I've been so thoroughly happy with how my pen writes, that I just wanted to throw it out there. It definitely has a cheaper feel, but it writes like a champ. 
