Very Interesting.
It seems that many of us got into the keyboard business for similar reasons.
Years ago, I bought a Hammond spinet and completely converted it to solid state (no tubes!). The hardest part in duplicating the original sound was converting the tremolo phase shifter, but got that worked out so that the instrument sounded identical to the tube version.
Then I cut it apart, rebuilt it into three pieces. Keyboard with all of the solid state circuits, the pedal board, and the original tonewheel mechanism (along with a wide ribbon cable to inter connect the keyboard and tone generator). I did all of this so that it could be transported in my old Volkswagon Beetle. It still weighed a ton but did fit into the beetle.
Later I graduated to a nice Technics spinet that only weighed 115 lbs. This was great but went to the keyboard after my wife Georgiana threw her back out helping me lug the spinet around for a gig.
I hated the keyboard (KN2000) at first, but got hooked on it after I started to learn how to use it.
So here we are -- with a nice KN7000 and a wife without a backache. The best of two worlds, wouldn't you say?
Walt