It amazes me that there are people that would pay that much money for what is really a "museum piece" rather than a practical lens. Even when new it wasn't considered a great lens, but it was an era when Canon and Nikon were fighting for bragging rights as to who had the fastest glass. This beat the Canon f/1.2 by a whopping 1/10 of an f/stop. A few years later Canon trumped Nikon with their f/0.95 and the race stopped.
Tri-X was a lot more grainy than it is now, and often pushed a stop or two. The grain was the defining feature of sharpness, not optical quality. If you really needed speed there was Agfa Isopan Record at ISO 1,000 and Kodak Royal-X Pan Recording (only available in bulk) at 1,200. With either film a Summicron really looked no sharper than the f/1.1 Nikkor. Lens sharpness couldn't compete with the grain.
The 50/1.4 Nikkor was an optical masterpiece, even by today's standards. Just think about how much film you could buy with the $5,000 you saved, and you wouldn't be afraid to actually take the thing out on the street and use it. Another way to look at it would be that if it were really such a great lens it would have seen some use, and even with light use for half a century it would look far from pristine. There weren't many collectors when that lens was new, and they were mostly looking for things like the Ermanox or perhaps the rare Compur Leica with a fixed Elmar and a Compur leaf shutter mounted in the lens. Back aboout 1970 I knew one guy who had both the older dial set and newer rim set versions, along with a Leitz Thambar complete with its center spot filter, and a few other goodies. He didn't even display them! He kept them in locked boxes in a temperature and humidity controlled storage facility. (I always wondered if his heirs sold the stuff at a yard sale or donated it to a church rummage sale?)
