Indeed. I'll think back to what you could do as far as mastering back in the mid-to-late 90's and it wasn't much (or it took a long time). Not only that, all transfers had to be done in realtime and you had to listen for flaws during the transfer.
I think back to my TCD-D7 running me a grand and CSB's costing what they did -- for that money, in today's dollars, I could have a set of AKG Actives with one to two sets of caps, a TinyBox and an M10 or DR-2D.