Aw man, that is too bad.
We’re a family of four, but in normal times we’ll take a set of parents or friends on a road trip somewhere about twice a year. I find a minivan too much car under normal circumstances but perfect for the six person situation. So I drive a station wagon (essentially a sedan with slightly more storage space) and we’ll rent a minivan for those longer six person road trips. I remember a rental car company once tried to pass off an SUV for my minivan reservation and it was ridiculous. With the back seats up in theory you could fir everyone as long as nobody brought any luggage whatsoever (!). I refused to take it and they found an actual minivan elsewhere.
But I definitely don’t want to drive one on a regular basis. It’s just too much car and I find the handling irritating. I feel the same way about SUVs actually. I like normal, close to the road, cars. A wagon is the perfect compromise.
I didn’t see this thread when it was new, but in the OP’s situation, a minivan would seem to be a better choice in the near term. I bought a minivan when we found out Moon Unit was under construction, and it served us well through years of transporting kids. It was a lot easier to handle in terms of buckling them in (we actually opted for the version with the middle bench seat with built-in carseats), and it was useful when we were driving on Girl Scout trips. To seat the same number of people, we’d have had to buy a larger SUV that would have cost more.
When the minivan became unreliable, at about 10 years old, we did replace it with an SUV that seated 5. At that point we were not doing as much Scout driving so the extra seating wasn’t needed all that often (and there were always other parents driving). I had gotten to really love the higher seating position vs a sedan, so going back to a sedan was not an option at that point.
The OP has, I presume, long since made a decision one way or the other, but my general advice would be buy whatever will serve you the best on a day-to-day basis, and when you need something different, rent that for a few days. If there’s a feature you really HAVE to have on those rare occasions, that might be hard to find in a rental (e.g. towing setup) then that would skew the decision one way or the other.
When we did longer family trips after the SUV replaced the minivan, that’s exactly what we did: we rented a minivan. On a trip to Florida with our 2 kids and a student from Canada, we could have seated all 5 but it would have been hideously crowded with 3 in the back seat and all our luggage, so we rented a minivan. Ditto when we drove to New England and Quebec a couple years ago, and then when we drove to WIsconsin shortly after that. A few hundred bucks each time was a lot cheaper than purchasing a larger vehicle for daily use.
I do not understand why anyone would buy an SUV unless they need bad-road capacity to get to where they are going on a regular basis. It has no advantages and many disadvantages compared to just about any other vehicle. But I accept that I don’t understand most consumer behavior to do with vehicles.
I owned a minivan for awhile. It was great. Unbelievable how much stuff plus humans you can cram in those things.