There's definitely some tangible appeal of building a robust '80s machine. Even with a quality software or FPGA emulator, the "feelies" are missing-- there's no opportunity to slide in an expansion card or manually fit it with a bunch of DIP RAM, or load stuff of of physical floppies.

Building a solder-it-yourself XT clone was a lot of fun for me, but I've sort of balked at the Amiga-flavoured projects in the space. It seems like they all start with "first get these five chips that really only can be harvested from a dead Amiga and cost a small fortune, so you'd better pray you don't put them in the socket backwards."

Maybe the middle ground would be using a FPGA to replace the custom chips, but the board is still designed with the right slots and sockets to fit an A2000 (or ATX) case and it still takes commodity parts like the 68000. Or maybe some 680x0 project targeting EmuTOS-- I'd expect it, as an open project, to be more adaptable to differing hardware than "must run exactly 1987 Amiga software with zany copy-protection and timing gimmicks".