I don't know what the difference is between the Canyon and the Specialized that makes the Canyon lighter and the cost less! I did hear when Canyon became all the rage that there were some frame issues with their road bikes, I'm not much into MTB's and hybrids so I haven't read about those, but when a road bike frame failed while under warranty Canyon wouldn't honor their warranty, not to mention the hassle they gave people trying to get a response out of Canyon...so I'm a bit leery of the them even though lately they seemed to have cleaned up their act and even got voted bike company of the year last year by some European rag for customer service, so maybe the negative beginnings woke them up?
I had a bike that the Scandium frame cracked after about 8,000 miles and a year of time, the company, out of Italy, refused to honor the warranty saying the frame failed due to fatigue!? My lawyer said it wasn't worth pursuing because his cost would exceed the value of the frame easily, for free my lawyer sent a letter just to see what would happen and the company didn't respond. And that's what would happen if a frame fails a lawyer isn't going to be of much use because the cost of the legal fees would be by far greater than the cost of another frame and I think bicycle companies as a whole know that fact real well so some will play that game. Even Litespeed, after the original owner, Lynskey, sold it to ABG or some such company, were putting out frames with issues and ABG would not honor their warranty, I think they too after much negative publicity decided to play nice and are no longer doing that. There was one guy that I knew on a forum that had a lot of money, he decided to retain a lawyer against LiteSpeed even though he knew it was going to cost a lot more money then the frame was worth, and after 2 years he finally won the case, but he probably could have bought 3 or 4 brand new titanium bikes for what the legal fees cost him! but he wanted to teach them a lesson and could afford to do so.
Anyway, I would definitely look at the Specialized models and see what you think after test riding them. Most people simply love the Zertz vibration dampening system, I rode one of their road bikes once and I also liked it too but I decided on a titanium Lynskey, which the properties of the TI dampens vibrations just as well I thought.