Aaah! Nooo sometimes the ads are the best - they give a window into what was available, pricing, etc.
There's stuff I've gleaned from looking at the AW issues that I had no idea even existed, much less is listed on the AHDB and Amiga History and so on.
Well, I actually agree with you pretty much. So I kept a set of ads in every few months to act as a snapshot of the market... but until I got my scanner with autofeeder, it was a pain to scan all those ads. The ones in VTU were a lot like the other home video zines of the day.. those huge multipage spreads from places like 47th street photo for VCRs and toys only peripherally Amiga related. (excuse the pun)
I seem to have lost track of it (easy to do on a terrabyte disk) but I had a 300 dpi scan of the last run of AC's guide to Amiga that I was going to run through OCR software when I got a faster peecee... now that I have one, I'm going to have to look for those files.