The "cost of your time" depends on the individual. Some are cash-rich time-poor, some are time-rich cash-poor.
The cost can also be negative, e.g. if repairing something allows you to learn something that is later valued by, say, a potential employer.
While I advise beginners against trying to repair scopes, I get irritated by people that claim that only DSOs should be considered and/or that DSOs are better in all respects. Neither is true.
In what regard are CROs better and why aren't companies capitalizing on that?
We've already seen a very simple, very clear example: finding a glitch in a waveform when you don't have any idea what you're looking for. With an analog scope, that initial diagnosis is as straightforward as adjusting the focus on a microscope, and more importantly, you don't have the question of whether what you see or don;t see is an artifact of the digital sampling process. This is why they are still often found in laboratory settings.
Companies that NEED them that ARE capitalizing on the fact; laboratory-grade CROs with traceable service history and calibration are still trading for serious money in those circles.
The difference is that a good CRO requires a high-quality CRT, which single part would cost more to manufacture today than a whole DSO, even a decent mid-range one.
The death of CROs has nothing to do with whether it is better or not; it has to do with what it costs to make a high-quality CRO vs a high-quality DSO that MAY OR MAY NOT be able to perform as well as a laboratory-grade CRO.
This, coupled with the fact that we now need to be able to troubleshoot digital signals more often than analog, results in the trade-off made for digital: you lose some absolute resolution, and you lose the simple, linear relationship between what you're measuring and what shows up on the screen to the exigencies of digital sampling. That doesn't mean high-quality CROs aren't able to PERFORM; in some cases they can STILL perform better and work better as a diagnostic tool.
Tektronix operated on a different business model than is expected in today's world of greed and multimillion-dollar management payscale; first, they produced bleeding-edge high-tech using the best materials obtainable at the time, BAR NONE. Second, they operated on approximately a 3:1 cost:profit ratio, while today's big business expects closer to a 10:1 ratio, and they do that by pushing as much of their cost onto the 3rd party overseas manufacturing. Third, they manufactured EVERYTHING here in the USA, using USA workforce and paying above-average wages to get the best-qualified workers and to KEEP THEM, as opposed to the current mantra of "reduce cost of workforce by ANY MEANS POSSIBLE", even if that means most of your work is done by incompetents and/or shipped overseas.
Of COURSE that model couldn't survive in THIS "Profit is the only thing that matters" society.
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mnem
The problem with capitalism in a nutshell: It's propagation model is that of a virus; which means that eventually it kills its host.