[@jiffyg] I am going to chime in here and then everyone can attack me. I think that many lesser priced tube based designs can be very musical and soft sounding which compliments many lesser expensive ss designed amps. So on the more affordable side of things I believe that tubed equipment sounds pleasing, maybe not super revealing or hyper accurate, but very pleasing. Obviously as the price goes up and the true art and science of sound reproduction is achieved both solid state and tubed designs both hit all the stops, sound stage, intimacy, immediacy and revealing of source information.
At least you know what you like and can obtain it. Some don't know, and drive themselves nuts rotating one piece of gear to the next never finding what they like.
In a similar fashion to your findings there can be what I think of as the "golden era" sound to some older tube amps and older receivers, integrated, preamps with old caps and old carbon resistors and such that can be enjoyable to listen to.
Recently helping a friend on his highly modified "lesser cost" Jolida integrated tube amplifier, with old vintage input/driver tubes and newer PSVANE KT88s mixed with some decent interconnect and speaker cables we hit on the same sound you refer to. It's quite musical to listen to, and his total amp investment is about half cost of comparable amps with equal or less musicality. It can be achieved, to your point.
