Regarding editing before scanning:
I've studied under two professors with two very different schools of thought.
One, in journalism school, was a proponent of shooting as much of a subject as possible, and print/scan only three or four, if that, per roll. She could spot picks from a contact sheet in under a minute flat (and would chastise you for wasting time printing anything else). That decision making skill was valuable moving to digital.
The other, from whom I studied LF and architecture photography, stressed the importance of note-taking and scanning, or at least contact printing, everything, for one's own record keeping. You never know if an image will round out a collection, caught something you missed, or just be a record of a particular film/dev/technique combination; doesn't mean you need to fully process each image.
With the Minolta and its six-frame holders, I took the former approach more often, since the device required more attention. With the Coolscan and roll film attachment, scanning an entire roll at a time at full resolution isn't a problem, and is less time in front of the screen. I get a digital contact sheet at the end of it, and can down-res or delete what I won't intend to print without any added effort.
Considering my subject matter often includes street snaps I don't know if they turned out as keepers, personal snapshots and memories, and streetscapes that might be of later historic interest, it's worth it to get everything digitized before decision making. The executive process is still important, just shifted to a later point, with the added benefit of everything digitized and at hand.
One example: about a year ago, I worked on a historic survey in a very rapidly changing neighborhood here in Seattle. We needed pre-development images for comparisons, and luckily I had a whole hard drive of snapshots from a decade ago, scanned during processing and ready to go. None of them were 'keepers,' per se, anything I'd want to print or even spend time on, but it was great to have them ready during a deadline.
But I realize that's a unique situation and an idiosyncratic workflow. I like to think I'm fairly disciplined while editing and shooting, so I have a higher percent of what I think are keepers. That's why I value a batch-capable scanner, so I spend more time actually editing than feeding the machine. I do see the downsides, however, having known the type of people who don't dare delete any digital image they've ever shot.
But back to the discussion at hand.
First, the economics are a bit clearer now that I've looked around at what's available used. It's amazing how cheap the Coolscans are going even compared to when I got mine.
Second, regarding image quality: Nominally, the Minolta 5400 is higher resolution, but I definitely get better quality images from the LS4000 because of film flatness thanks to the roller transport. I don't think I ever scanned at full resolution with the Minolta and had far more problems with dust, alignment, and film curvature. I'd be curious to watch the mentioned Pakon and Noritsu models in action.
