To be fair the early “light weight” digital units (TDS200) were fairly groundbreaking when they came out. They had no fan, decent display, weighed bugger all, we’re pretty cheap and had enough functionality to tick most basic boxes.
You forgot the main point !
You got 1 GS/s for dirt cheap !
Portability / LCD / form factor was equally ground breaking.
I remember when they just came out and we had received a batch of them at school. They looked like an alien spaceship, every one wanted to have them to play with, nobody wanted the CRO's anymore...
I remember telling the Tek rep who visited us my two criticisms about them though. Sluggish LCD and no way to uncalibrate the time base to do phase measurements yet no automatic measurement either to compensate for that.
Each to their own but for me I Iove Tek scopes including digital stuff but only the first generation : TDS200 and TDS 300/500/600/700 and their various A/B/C revisions. Still would love a fully optioned TDS 784D or better yet a 794 but rare as hens teeth.
Later digital scopes from Tek don't attract me at all. Even their latest offering.
Recent stuff from HP / Keysight does attract me, but R&S even more.
That said all these modern scopes still look bloated with millions lines of code that always contain some sort of bug or quirk or lack of responsiveness no matter what, and a UI I always find something wrong with. I particularly hate the blue HP uses every where in their menus and buttons, I hate blue (only for classic Tek CRTs !
). If at least you could customize the colours like you can in a 30 year old Tek TDS...
I like yellow on black background, like R&S does.
TBH not seen any problems with the surface mount tants. The only plague worthy mention was the SMD cans in the TDS5xx and TDS7xx series.
And then if I am not mistaken, only on the first two generations of the 500 (vanilla 500 and 500A) and the very first gen of 700. The 700A was already fixed in this regard IIRC. Also the 600 was never affected even in first gen if I am not mistaken.
I have a TDS 544A, so it was affected. All the caps were sorted 5 years ago by the seller (got it from Shakal Nokturn, hi Shakal !
) when I got it and now runs perfectly, still to this day.