So I went out this evening with a few agents and saw Festival City and then Greenway Gardens (or something like that, about 8 minutes walk south of Tai Wai station) and Manlai Court, which is right next to the station.
I was not into the whole Festival City look at all. It was so gaudy I nearly had to vomit and the apartments themselves were extraordinarily poorly laid out with terrible use of even their "usable" space. The only one worthwhile as a real consideration there in my opinion was the largest 4 bedroom 2.5 bath flat, which the agents were quoting to me as 27k and thought they might be able to get down to 26 or 25k. While we're willing to add to our housing allowance, we don't want to add more than 20% to it. So, it appears that is out of the question, which is fine, because you are paying for the awful decorations that adorn everything in the public areas (no joke, they have Versace and Fendi labels on the elevator and door fittings).
Because of my visible unease with the surroundings I think the agent picked up that I might want to look at older style buildings. The other two I think were roughly comparable, with nice sized rooms and beautifully maintained parquet floors, however they were a) just a tad too small for our needs (only 3 bedrooms, though of decent size) b) obviously do not have the level of amenities of one of the bigger complexes (though did have pools and decent outside children's areas), and c) were lived in and so had (for my tastes) extremely odd choices for decoration that would require renovation to remove. They all fell in a bit below my price range though. I think there is likely to be a happy medium out there. I just need to look more. I think I will go out Sunday to look in Shatin proper and at some places along the Ma On Shan line (though perhaps not quite so far out as Ma On Shan stop or Wu Kai Sha). By the way the agents wouldn't even take us to Granville Gardens because they said it was extremely expensive, so I guess the prices have gone up a bit since you lived there last, unfortunately.