You are perfectly correct and if I had been in their shoes with my eye on the present I may have felt the same but the future may not be as rosy. We have to attract people to our pastime and if they realise that the available permitted mouldboards are impossible to find or prohibitively expensive the numbers may start to dwindle. Not too many of the top men choose to use anything other than TCNs or RWMs so the fact that they could make a decent job with any old lump of iron clearly is not a very attractive option for them. In other words all this hypothetical mumbo jumbo that you and Howard ascribe to is rubbish.