..... It's nice to be able to get somewhere in 2 hours instead of 6 or 8.
However, 6 hours of sailing on a good day are more fun than 2 hours of motoring. You don't often take your power boat out and travel in circles for half a day for the joy of being on the water. With sailing you can often just "go for a sail" for the day with no destination in mind. Power boating is the best way to get to a destination efficiently. When sailing, the journey is often the destination.
Comments like these always cause me to shake my head - maybe I'm just too sensitive, but there's frequently a slight condescending attitude of self-enlightenment from some sailors. I wonder if folks who say this are more than day/weekend sailors with a dream to cruise. It's the old saying "When all you have is a hammer, all the world looks like a nail." I would much prefer if the guidance were "Gee, I really, really like sailing, so if it doesn't involve sailing, I'm not interested." The truth is that cruising - power or sail - requires a broad set of seamanship, mechanical, and planning skills to be self-sufficient that have little to do with sheeting sails.
There is a reason so many sailors turn to power, and so few powerboaters go to sail. For us, it was because we like the journey and found a sailboat was not fit-for-purpose much of the time. Too much wind. Too little wind, Too wet, too hot, too cold, too many bugs, etc. It's not that we chose a powerboat to get somewhere, we chose one to get-gone for however much time we could afford (measured in days/weeks with jobs). Didn't really care where, just go. For us, a boat is a magic carpet that takes us to imaginary places that take on a glossy perspective from the water - sail or power. Everywhere we wanted to use a boat was more difficult and less comfortable in a sailboat: The California Delta (SF to Sacramento through sloughs and farmland with small towns) is sort of similar to cruising the ACW. It's mostly channel, has patches of skinny water, and gets dang hot in the summer - not exactly premier sail/cruising. Outside the Golden Gate? Going more than Drakes Bay (30 nms north) or Pillar Point/Half Moon Bay (25 nms south) means overnight runs in 50-degree weather, not exactly a charming experience in an open cockpit.
Contrast that to our trawler which is no speedster. Last year, we ran from SF non-stop to Ensenada MX, over 500 nms in 74 hours and burned around 80 gals of diesel. More than that, it was a great journey as we enjoy multi-day non-stop passages. While our Willard was purpose-built for runs like these, there are many trawler-style boats in the $50k range that would due (though I would definitely advocate for stabilization). 15-years ago I did a similar trip with a friend who was died-in-the-wool sailor. He sold his Brewere 46 Pilothouse Sloop 3-years later and now owns a trawler.
When I first read the OP's post, the ocean crossing seemed like an asterisk, mostly he wanted to cruise the islands. Cross-off the "Briton" comment, and there are a lot of $50k boats that fill that bill - The Loop, Bahamas, Caribbean (east and west), Bocas del Toro, San Blas Islands, and of course through the Panama Canal and north if so desired. Would suggest an IridiumGO/PredictWind subscription and some weather education including planning around favorable seasons.
Bottom line: for us, we enjoy serious coastal-passagemaking. For us, a trawler-style boat is 1000% more fit-for-purpose than a sailboat. I'll go one step further - we like displacement speeds and feel very safe and comfortable aboard a true displacement trawler that is stabilized. As others have mentioned, there is a sistership for sale for $80k, albeit non-stabilized. The only benefit to a sailboat is it has sails so if that's how you define cruising, then that's all that is suitable. I gather by the number of sail-to-power converts that many define cruising more broadly as a lifestyle detached from purely sail. That said if I could squeeze a Laser dinghy-sailboat on Weebles, I would be in bliss - sail around anchorages and such. But sailboats for coastal passagemaking? Workable, but not optimal unless you're a died-in-wool sailor or on such an extreme budget that you have no other options.
Peter
And, then there is often that pesky issue of the wind doesn't always blow in the direction you may want to travel. 
