Looking for advice on versatile zoom lens for Nikon

[Mav]

All of Nikon's current lenses either have a very wide range and are butt slow at f/5.6, or f/2.8 and have limited range. What you might want is something that's f/4 constant ideally, but Nikon has never really believed in building these. Canon has a 24-105 f/4L IS which is awesome, full frame, and gives you a decent range even on entry level DSLRs. Nikon has no equivalent. The closest they come is the 28-105 f/3.5-4.5 which you can read about pretty extensively here. They're discontinued, but not hard to find used for dirt cheap. It's a nice range on a full-frame camera like the D3, and even usable on crop body cameras. It's not "fast" per se, but you wanted range, right? Well at f/4.5 at the long end, it's 2/3rds of a stop faster than an f/5.6. It also has a handy 1:2 macro mode.

Maybe not quite what you had in mind, but it seems to fit your needs. I know a lot of people that really love this lens so it might be worth a shot.