You might want to consider not changing the monitor, but your application --

0.21 dot poitch is relatively small. You'll either need to sit closer, or increase the font size to compare to your previous monitor. As I tend to sit further away from larger monitors, I can actually lose real estate in terms of number of viewable characters as the screen size increases.

Consider color and brightness -- CRTs can be very bright. I find that keeping my background color to an off white helps with long term legibility when reading text. Sometimes, adjusting the overall monitor brightness can help. You want a high enough brightness and contrast to read everything, but not so bright that it's making your eyes tired. You may want different settings for daytime vs. nighttime work. (I work just from monitor glow late at night)

As for the LCDs -- they're just fine for coding and such. I do much of my work on a laptop, or an external LCD monitor connected to the laptop. The important thing to remember is that LCDs are only really good at their max resolution. (maybe at 1/2 the resolution, but it'll look bad if you randomly choose). Large CRTs force you to worry about the depth of the table/desk, and its overall strength, and can be a royal pain to move, but they do tend to last a rather long time.

The only monitor that I've used that I really didn't like was a Sun 21" CRT -- it gave me the worst headaches when using it. I've seen a few CRTs that sort of got fuzzy over time, as well, but I can't remember what brand they were (it was a whole lab full of them that started going bad)