Well .... i think the world has changed some from when we were young. Was in the trades for 30 years and running my own small carpentry outfit for sixteen of them. There's a lot of pressure to get the job done as quickly as possible nowadays. It might only take 45 minutes to swap out a pressure tank with a new one. It could take hours to swap out the air bladder. All the while ... the labor meter is running.

I think another factor is the warranty on labor & materials. Throw in something new .... you probably won't get a callback on it for years. Fix an old thing and you might have to come back in a year or two when it reaches end of life. The customer gets PO'd because they had to pay for it twice.

Whew ... i hear ya on the Jetta solenoid. The center bearing on the drive shaft for my Subaru Outback went a few months ago. You can't even buy the center bearing anymore. You have to buy the whole prop shaft assembly from front to back.

That one has turned into a saga. First tried ordering the center bearing on ebay. They cancelled the order after a couple of days. Ordered a new shaft assy from rockauto and that failed in the first month. Eventually figured out that i'm gonna have to go OEM and that one is scheduled for tomorrow. What should have been a simple $ 30.00 part replacement has turned into a project that will probably run over a grand by the time it's all said & done.

Humm .... let's see ... how many pounds of #2 copper does that work out to ?