I agree with the sentiment but not with your punctuation. (Ignoring the fact that you begin a sentence with "But")
Eimai, According to H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage and the OED. it is an "outworn grammatical pedantry, a superstition, to believe that beginning a sentence with And or But is a solecism" And I believe you once chided me for using an "archaic" word!
The punctuation was correct. There was no need to use a colon after I agree with Jim, the next phrase, it is a cumbersome sentence, is not what I would call an appositive phrase or clause. If it HAD been, then you would have needed to use a capital letter following the colon. Likewise, there was no need to use a full stop after the word sentence. I chose to use only ONE sentence. Also we do not generally put our replies in inverted commas. I use inverted commas, (or as the Americans call them quotation marks,) when I am quoting someone. Finally, (since people in glass houses should not throw stones,) you should have known to place a full stop OUTSIDE the last parentheses of the reproduced sentence above. ![Smile [:)]](/emoticons/emotion-1.gif)