Emskidoodlepip, maybe you would mourn DAT less if you had, like, 200+ decades-old tapes that you needed to transfer ASAP on your own time, especially with the dwindling supply of reliable playback decks. It was never a physically robust recording medium or especially, an archival medium. But yes, in its day it was a huge step forward in convenience during recording compared, for example, with the PCM-F1 + SL-2000 combination that I used before.
(OK, I now step back and declare this thread no longer adrift.)