Older Computer Boards

I think it is a well known fact that anything you buy today, is not quite what it was yesterday. Most especially in qualities sake. They have refined the manufacturing process to the mini-millionths of a mite. There are those who would argue that it wasn't for profits sake, all I can say to that is, hahahahaha! ; )
Soo, when memory was at $1000 per MB, and HDDs much more, and motherboards had real gold on them, add in cards(fingerboards) too, were they not manufactured equal to their respective CPUs(the ones which are now priced at $140lb, while todays are at $5lb, for obvious reasons of course) ?
My question is this, since it's visibly obvious that their gold is thicker and golder, why aren't older boards given this treatment?

I will try to answer this to best of my know how. If you look at the older computer parts. Yes you can see that the ammount of gold surface is greater and what looks to be thicker. Now what you dont notice in your above statement is that the stuff on the board is also much heavier and therefor your parts per million of say gold is not overly drasticaly different in your home computer parts. This wasnt so in the telecom and military grade boards of yesteryear and today. Back in the early years the PCB was much thicker material in the layers of the board. As trace paths become smaller they could fit more per layer and less layers are also needed in todays PCB's. Back in the 50's and 60's they could only do single sided trace paths so this makes gold finger boards worth a little more in my opinion not only because they were thicker coating of gold but because there is not 3 to 5 layers of fiber board making up the PCB. Now also with more layers comes more copper content int the board since most trace paths are copper paths. This is what I can tell you from what I know. I hope this helps shed a little light on the subject.

Thanks PTS. Those points could well be valid, especially in the cases of older finger boards having small transformers and speakers, as on ISA modems. I still see older motherboards being much richer than new ones. And what about older RAM sticks? Those are mostly ceramic chips and fingers, no other components involved, and very little board content. The PMs are in the chips as well, and still older, better, and thicker. Any thoughts on that one?

It isnt cost effective to send a 30,000 lb load to the refinery of just "vintage" boards. It is also extremely difficult to generate.

Additionally having them in the mix with the newer boards helps with keep recoveries up.