Congratulations Simon!
If you get into challenging backcountry terrain, snowboards rule in all conditions except for ice/glaciated slopes.
From my experiance snowboards are the biz when you can maintain speed, the minute you can't ( which in all truth is probably more than 50% of the time, you are a one legged liability that has to be towed along by the nearest skier. Snowboards are easy in off piste but once you can master off piste ski ing then you will never look back on the boards.

When are you going to invite us over for abit of off piste then Rolf, 600m in your back garden sounds right up my street.