I agree with you that most of the problems with recordings can be traced back to bad mastering, and that records often had more careful mastering than CDs have had. No, that's not a misprint. If either format proves successful, the prices should drop to a couple hundred dollars for a player. As for the software, if an SACD costs any more than a few pennies more than a standard CD, they are gouging, too. If Sony had a brain in their avaricious little heads, they would sell every CD in their collection with SACD hidden inside, at no premium in price.
Tubes are wonderful.
However, I'll put my 5500 watts of McIntosh solid state amplification up against anybody's tube rig anytime. If you don't have to replane all the doors in the house after watching Earthquake, you just didn't experience it. Not that I'm immune to the siren song of the tube amplifiers. Fortunately, a Google websearch brought up a careful argument as to why that would be a really bad idea. I had to listen.