>>3974836Well, I understand your logic. If I was in your shoes I would have gotten an M4 or M3 SS in perfect condition. But if you want a new camera and absolutely nothing but Leica will do, then the MP makes sense.
And if you have that much disposable income, then why the hell not? It's certainly cheaper and less hassle than buying a boat or sportscar. Glad I got into camera collecting instead of the usual boomer hobbies.
What bothers me about Leica is, as recently as I was growing up, they were simply known as a brand which made extremely high-quality professional tools at a fair price. Sometime after the M4-P they reinvented themselves as a luxury brand while ironically, the quality of their product deteriorated. Less for more.
I owned an M6 with an older 35mm Cron for a few months and hated it. I was expecting something like the IIIf except with black paint and more modern controls. Not so. The vulcanite felt plasticky and there was already corrosion underneath the paint. The viewfinder was quite dim and the meter absolutely sucked. The “Leica look” was nice but the shooting experience was extremely underwhelming. So I sold it and bought the 35SE and Hexar for less than half the cost of that kit (albeit in 2006). I don't miss the Leica at all.
As an aside, people overestimate the difficulty of zone focusing. When I bought the 35SE, I set up a tape measure in my yard and spent a number of hours standing at the exact physical distance of each of the markers on the lens’s distance scale. Since then I almost never miss focus. It's a camera which has to be learned intimately to use properly, which belies its small and simple appearance.