I guess I would agree with your point of view for the most part. I have always had the view that it's your car and that you can and should be able to do whatever you want to it/with it. If you want to restore it back to showroom condition, to the point where every bolt and screw is factory correct and you can afford to do it, I say great. Go for it. You will have a beautiful car when you're finished and you will have my respect and admiration. If you choose to go the other route and give the car a paint job that wasn't a factory color and you decide that you want some pinstriping or even ghost flames on your car, modify the engine, install chrome exhaust tips and some aftermarket wheels to complete the look, if you did decent work, you will also have a beautiful car, as well as my respect and admiration. If you can only afford to get your car running and make it roadworthy, you also deserve and will get my respect and admiration. You have, at least temporarily, saved a classic car and brought another classic car into the hobby and we should all thank you for that.
What a lot of people in the hobby seem to forget is that the automotive hobby is not only about restoring cars. It's also largely about modifying, hot rodding and customizing cars. The customizing part of it can make me shudder sometimes because there are quite a few people who should never be allowed anywhere near a Sawsall. Do they and should they have the right to cut up an otherwise perfectly good car? Yes, it's their property, they bought it and paid for it. So yeah, they should have the right. Should we try to talk them out of doing it, provided they tell us their intentions? Of course we should, but in the end it's their choice. I hate seeing cars where someone cut the roof, trying to "chop" the car and never finishing it only to have the car end up at the scrapyard waiting to be crushed. I hate seeing butchered monstrosities that are the result of someone trying to make an "El Ranchero" out of a decent hardtop. So, yeah, if they tell you they're planning something like that, by all means, try to persuade them not to do it. Those attempts at customization almost always result in a ruined car. On the other hand, a non-factory paint job/color and aftermarket wheels does not ruin a car (if no cutting of body or chassis was done in order to make the wheels fit).
What bothers me? What do I have no tolerance for? Well, at one extreme end of our hobby, I have no tolerance for what I refer to as the snobbery of matching numbers. There's a lot of it on certain other car forums and it occasionally has tried to creep in over here too and there always seems to be at least one or two at local shows and cruise nights. At the other extreme end are the guys who call themselves car guys, but seem to have no second thoughts about entering classic cars into demo derbies and then justify it by saying that it was not their particular brand or body style of choice. Just because they wouldn't build or restore that particular brand or model doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't. By derbying it, they have prevented one more classic car from potentially entering the hobby or at least becoming a parts car and some of them don't even sell the parts they strip off the car. I have no tolerance for those types at all. Both of these extremes in our hobby can keep people out of our hobby by making them feel unwelcome and by making it prohibitively expensive and extremely difficult to obtain parts and, in my opinion, hurt the entire hobby in general and do deserve to be criticized.
If you take the live and let live too far, you end up with "undocumented aliens" NO they're ILLEGAL aliens, we're still a country of laws. If I steal a car, I'm not the "undocumented owner", I'm a thief. Placating bad behavior is not the answer to anything. My father had a saying, "If someone's an *******, you've got to tell them, otherwise they'll walk around thinking they're normal."
