Just a bit over 5 years ago, I started a classic Deadlands campaign...
Congratulations! Gaming attention spans longer than 1 month are a beautiful thing.
1) Not a super-crunchy system. While the players are all capable of working with such a system, playing system is not the primary reason for any of the players to be at my table. On top of this, we play short weeknight sessions - and crunchy systems run slow. The end result would be a game where not much happened in a given session, and that's not a lot of fun. I need something that plays pretty quickly.
2) The system/setting must allow for a little bit of goofiness. One player, in particular, has a penchant for wild mages, mad scientists, and the like, and a setting too grim, or a mechanic too inflexible, would be unfun for him.
3) Combat won't be the player's primary focus. While the Deadlands party motto was, " We are best at Intimidation, sustained violence, and the dark arts," going to conflict for them is the culmination of dramatic necessities, not a desire to play tactical wargames (see point #1).
And here I totally expected a request of "what sort of setting should I be looking for?" To which I would answer, "this is the year of the sci-fantasy setting!"
Savage Worlds is definitely on my list. As you said, many of the basics would be very familiar, but we'd dispense with many of the baroque fiddly-bits of the original.
Similarly, FATE-based games have a character-growth issue. They're much better as character change over time that isn't actually power growth, IMHO.
Modos RPG, the game I've dropped into the ENworld downloads section, has some SW and Fate-like features. It has fewer fiddly-bits than SW (like pages and pages of Edges), but otherwise has a similar streamlined feel.
I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for with "long term character growth," but the game's level-up system is highly customizable. Since there's no system of tying XP to killing monsters, you can award levels (or portions of levels) whenever would be best for your campaign. There aren't classes either, so your party Druid doesn't wake up after a short rest and realize that he can turn into an elemental. Instead, players have the ability to create their own advancement by deciding what their attributes, skills, and hero points mean to them.
So, to hit the numbers above:
1) Not crunchy. There's only one extraneous table, really, and that's used for miraculous-type healing (if your PCs are the type to get into fights).
2) Goofiness: check. You, the GM, choose the theme of the game, and the PCs use that as the measuring stick for their characters. The subjective difficulty system measures things by what the "average person" could do, and if the campaign's average person can do goofy things, so can the PCs.
3) The game focuses on "conflict," not "combat." If that conflict is a heated debate or a campaign to undermine the credibility of a rival shadow network, it can use the same rules. The two levels: one-roll conflicts are for quick resolutions, so you can get on with roleplaying. Extended conflicts use a simple system of adding progress points to a pool, and reaching max progress (before your opposition) indicates victory. Combat is a subsystem of extended conflict.
4) If you have questions, I'm just a PM away. And I've created
a (fledgling) community for discussing issues about the game.
