I don't know that I would consider the Wendt a weird pre, it simply isn't used in the taper's circle all that much, but both my former Wendt X2 and now Wendt X4 are workhorses that I won't get rid of any time soon (at least the X4, as I've already sold the x2).
There are a lot of other ENG mixers/pre's (Filmtech, Sonosax, Cooper) that aren't used much in the taper's world, but are used by the film audio engineers all the time and in most cases these are very transparent.
Wayne