There's a lot of this stuff in music, though. People will drop crazy amounts of money on old guitars, amps, and equipment, even if the new stuff is a component for component recreation.
Basically, both time periods ('year X' and 'now') had a reasonable amount of 'crap' and a reasonable amount of 'excellent instruments'. When you take a 'now' instrument off the shelf, you're taking a gamble as to which it will be, whereas as a 'year X' instrument has had a large amount of the 'crap' removed from the pool (destroyed, treated less fairly, etc) whereas the 'excellent' instruments have been treated better and preserved because they're 'excellent' instruments.
50 years from now, they'll be saying that 2009 instruments were made better, and people will be paying a huge amount for genuine '09 vintage instruments. This phenomenon is actually easy to see - in the 70s fender had a reputation that post-CBS (ie 'now') instruments were junk, and 50s vintage instruments were worth spending a fortune for. Here in 2009 though, there is the same '70s fender instruments are pretty damned good' approach that there was then to 50s instruments, people will pay silly money for a genuine 60s or 70s jazzmaster, tornado, mustang or even teles or strats - though obviously the 50s vintags for those are still preferred generally over the 60s and 70s. Again, the 'crap' that was considered common then, has been filtered out of the available pool, leaving a 'vintage = well made' mindset.