You are absolutely right about the amount of upkeep involved in maintaining these machines, to say nothing of the money! To most of us its a hobby. Some of us take our hobbies more seriously than others, thats all.
You said new machines are "better" and "faster". No question they're faster, but so what? I may be in the minority here but for me, I am perfectly happy with 100 million instruction cycles PER SECOND. If the trade-off for me to increase the rate at which I can compute to, say, 3 billion instruction cycles per second is a switch to one of three equally horrendous operating systems (Mac, Linux or Windows), then I'll stick with the 100 million ticks/second, TYVM. As far as "better", thats subjective. Ask 100 people to define "better", you'll get 100 different definitions. My view is that new machines are not necessarily "better". They're bug ridden, complicated, virus prone, inefficient, prone to overheat, and top heavy with software. Granted, you can do a lot more gee-wiz 'multimedia' stuff with new machines (like games and pornography). But I'm not really into those things. I think you and me grew up around the same time and we probably both got started early using Amigas. As such, we took AmigaOS for granted thinking "this is how a computer behaves; we command it, not the other way around". Eventually Windows got big, but it was an abomination, the very antithesis of what a computer IS. At least thats how I viewed it.
To really appreciate the Amiga you kind of have to step back in time and undo a lot of the brainwashing of the last fifteen years.
