Thanks Fungus. That the analog oscilloscopes I have cost around or less than that $200 figure you mention. Even though it has some useful measurement functions, I have unfortunately found the 200MHz PM3094 wanting on occasion and I feel it would be usefull to go to the next step. The thought mentioned earlier in the thread, regarding buying one instrument that will last for many years to come and job done, struck a cord and also harmonised with my goal of reducing both bench and storage space requirements.
However, it seems going to that next step requires a considerable jump in finance. If money were no object (which sadkly is not the case) then it wouldn't matter. However I did recently see a view on another thread that a causual hobby purchase of 800-900GBP would generally be considered unjustifiable. In any case, if I were going to spend that much, then I would want to ensure that there are no silly gotchas and its the right purchase.
I had also been looking at used equipment on eBay thinking that possibly the Tektronix 2465 or 2465A might be a suitable candidate or perhaps a LeCroy if I were fortunate enough to find one for the right price, but as has also been pointed out, these would come with the age/maintenance issue and I don't beleive that either have digital signal capabilities or a bode plot function and I do plan to do some work ewith filters. Neither would do anything for my bench space requirement, although selling the existing analog scopes would certainly reduce storage.
It seems, all things considered, that the most practical solution is probably to "bite the bullet" and make this one-off purchase. I noted the comment that there is nothing else in this price bracket to compare with the MSO5000 series. Out of curiosity I compared with Tektronix and Keysight scopes but for thedse we are talking about an altogether different price point. I also looked at the Micsig, and although they are very tempting, they don't quite meets my needs. They have bus decoding, but the 300MHz version has only two channels. The GW-Insteks are considerably more expensive in Europe than they are in the states making a purchase here not worthwhile. Adding to that, they have a much lower memory depth, only 1Gs/sec and none of the advanced features.