Hi Chadnliz, I do generally agree with your comments about CRT, but just a few points to add - the Marquee CRT projectors are still being made by a company in Florida (http://vdcds.com/products/crt/8110-8500-9500.html - they make them for the military flight sims). The Marquee models have absoutely tons of spare parts available - partly because they've still been making them for the last few years. The Marquees are highly modular, so you can just pull out a board and swap in a new one etc. if you ever need one replaced, and prices have tumbled. New tubes used to cost about $600 but are far less now. The current market prices for CRT stuff is very different from even a year or two ago. I don't use any scaler - I just use a PC for the source (with a Blu-Ray drive).
I do agree though - it is a bit of an investment of time and effort and has its frustrations - it's not for everyone. Still, it was well worth it for me though - the quality difference is so big in my opinion that I think it will be a few more years before I can be convinced to switch to a digital (In fact I hope to upgrade to a new CRT in a year or so - a Marquee 9500, which would be about $3.5k). The projector provides me a lot of 'tweaking' fun too, kind of like analog. It was a long learning curve for me to get set up (I may have invested 50 hours + in getting stuff figured out), but it was a fun ride, and one I would recommend to anyone who has the bit of motivation and interest. I'm not technical, but thanks to online forums like avsforum I now know enough to be dangerous ;-)