Also, the better your deck is the better dubs you can make, which makes you more desirable in trading. Better quality decks will also get you in a better position on a tape tree. A better built deck will last longer and when it does develop problems will be worth fixing. With an individual head dedicated to playback and record they can each be optimized to best performance. Also, the ability to monitor the playback while recording can be extremely useful in use and calibration.
Most features are of no real use and can sometimes degrade the deck's performance.
This is particularly true of auto reverse. Since the heads have to move they become easily misaligned. The auto rewind feature on many Onkyo decks is not really useful but is not sonically degrading. A real time counter with time remaining can be extremely useful. Since even the better decks are not really built that well anymore, reliability is something that also needs to be considered.