I think I am one of the offenders the OP is referring to, as I've been posting about/bumping threads of radical! and DH mod's. In the case of my Radical!, it was a dirty broken project when I got it. The cabinet art is all messed up and I'm never going to fix it. Now that it's working, I would rather make it "my own" than perfect. I honestly don't want to bother fixing the cabinet decals. It is never going to be collector's quality and I don't care. Even if I made it MINT... I bet my drunk friends and I would find a way to ding it up or otherwise mess it up on account of my noob-ness. What I'm saying is, I would rather have this be a player's pin that feels like a custom one-of-a-kind than a collectable that I can flip and profit from.
I restore Motorcycles and mopeds and feel the same way. Some of them are good candidates for factory-spec restores and can be made to look new without having to completely reassemble and repaint... others are beyond messed up from people tinkering with em over the years. Those latter bikes I see as an opportunity to make them unique and do things that maybe others had not thought of. I've taken both types of bikes to shows and 9/10 times it's the unique/mod'd ones that get the most attention.
That is just my two cents though.