Good question, Jock. I wouldn't know the answer. Also, it depends.
The only vintage thing I'd personally like to put on the table (if that would make any sense in a RFI-infested neighborhood that is) would be the R7A (which is very different from an R8) for its looks and features and the raw but phase noise limited performance and I'd simply ignore how good or bad the maintainability is (AFAIK it's not
that bad). C'mon, it really has it all - a preselector, a gentle pseudo-sync detector (with its own cool name "Synchro-Phase"), an optional filter board, digital readout and a cool analog dial...
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
The only other radios with a lot of coolness factor and high performance coming into my mind are Collins 75S-1 or R-390, they don't suffer from a noisy PLL but they lack any modern features of course.
Other than that I don't have the space for becoming a radio museum and I already had a dead FRG-7700 that could've been resurrected only by cannibalizing the same odd PLL chip from an R-600, there are probably as much radios suffering from parts resupply issues as there are radios that don't... but I'm generally a sucker for performance and wouldn't consider any of those anymore. It might be different if I were a "program listener", then I'd probably go for the looks and I'd want a sync detector and that would put the R7 on the table again, but also the NRD-525/535/545 with their somewhat bland (to me) 80s design.