Just to follow on from some of the great observations above:
The P&S price spikes had me puzzled, but a younger person explained to me that some of the kids these days want a film camera that operates more or less like their phones: point and shoot. It is not so much that any of these kids are looking for Leica Summicron performance, they are just having fun and experimenting with an old format. The problem is that most p&s cameras are garbage. Rich kids go for the Contaxes and Yashica T4s and the Olympus Styluses because that is the direction to which online influencers are pointing them.
Regarding undervalued older SLRs. I think that maybe for those of us who grew up during the film era, when advanced film cameras were still ridiculously expensive for average people (re: the 1990s), there was some conventional wisdom about having a "starter" camera. To go-to models were cameras like the K1000 or older Nikkormats, etc. I hated my mid-to-late 90s starter camera (an Autoreflex TC) and never really bonded with it as it is a crappy camera (comparatively). I would have loved to have a Nikon F4 or Nikon F100 or something like that. Today, there is really no need to suggest to anyone to try a "starter" camera as really good advanced cameras are out there for cheap, where that was not the case in the 1990s and early 2000s. IMHO, I think it is more important to bond with a camera and be able to grow into it as you learn more about photography. To me, the significant undervalued cameras are ones that were top of the line or near during their era. Advanced amateur cameras of the 1960s and 1970s don't do it for me, as they are mostly heavy, have dark viewfinders, and low top shutter speeds (the era of 400 speed film really made the 1/1000 top shutter speed obsolete), and I would not recommend them to a beginner who has $100-200 to spend. Once you use a camera with a professionally bright viewfinder, it is hard to go back. 🙂. Also not a fan of mid-range or lower-end AF Nikons and Canons of the 1980s and 1990s for similar reasons -- too many compromises with those and today a few dollars more gets you a much better SLR.
Finally, I think that the influencer community has done both a good and bad job of promoting certain camera products. Heck, many of these people do not look like they were even alive when film cameras were being sold. During the 1990s and early 2000s, I spent hours and hours reading every webpage on cameras I could find written by the old pros and repairpeople whose insights were absolutely invaluable. As we've moved as a society to prefer video over the printed word as a method of learning, it would be a terrible shame to lose all of that collective wisdom folks created back then.
