thank you for cultivating an ideology of form over function.
Hey. Don't lump us all together.
There are multiple aspects of "The Hobby". It is not the same for everyone.
it's nice to know that some of these are impossible to find because of fine folks like you displaying them in glass cases so you can show off to uninterested friends and family. what use do you have for them beyond aesthetics? none.
...
your hoarding of vintage keyboards is disgusting. give them up to people who actually need them.
In my days, I have several times picked up keyboards without a system, and then traded or donated them or parts to a vintage computer collector/restorer who needed the keyboard/parts to restore his vintage system.
And many of us vintage keyboard geeks are also vintage-computer geeks as well.
I have seen a similar schism in my other collecting hobby: prop replicas. Some movie props that have become iconic had been made from real-world items that once were cheap but later became collectors' items for some other collecting hobby, such as camera collecting, or firearms collecting.
Not only has the increased competition hiked up the prices on the collectors market for just those items, but to turn them into the prop in an authentic way, some have had to be irreversibly modified.
Personally, I have never irreversibly modified a "real part", and tried to use castings or replica parts otherwise, even casting them myself if I had to.
But I think that this is less of a problem for vintage keyboards than for movie props, overall. It bugs me when I see a fully working keyboard of a rare type in good condition be stripped for its key switches, but I also know that in many other cases, keyboard enthusiasts buying vintage keyboards actually save (at least
parts of) them from being thrown on the scrapheap because of how many sellers are not knowledgeable or even care about how much we value them.