Guitar Nerds Anonymous

Its true. Fender and Roland have incredible things for half that. Tech 21 make some great analogue modelling amps.

I think the longstanding popularity of valve amps has much more to do with this "simplicity" I speak of than tone. There have been great transistor amps since the 70's, but I think they always remained in the shadows because they were more complicated and less "immediate".

It's basically because a valve responds in a particular way when you change the guitar's volume. A good overdriven sound on 10 becomes a clean sound when you turn it down to 5 (or just play more quietly).
Solid state amps can't do that in the same way. And even good modelling amps are not quite there either.