The issues is whether the consumer even wants a valve in the first place.
This!
I am too lazy to take a pic of my electronics workbench but trust me, there is a prototype circuit with a 12AX7 and I even have a Nixie power supply hooked up to it running 200+V. (I am too lazy to put a warning sticker on this, so just told the kids, don't ever touch anything on the table )
I love tubes (valves), I read and mostly understood ValveWizard's valve preamp book. (Great book, highly recommended.)
Here's the thing I realized. My son, who plays the guitar and is 12 just does not care. First, I was upset, then I realized, I am the obsolete one.
Our kids will not have the attachment to super-analog asymmetric (read the book) sounds like I do. And this is right. I was fooling around with my son and after recording realized that a free VST plugin can do better than most amps you could realistically get access to.
First, I was sad, then the post about Victory selling their amp profiles (for Kemper) for peanuts made me very happy. This really is the future, and this is about workflow. Also I bet a lot of people were super pissed with Henry Ford when he replaced their horses with something that did not shit all over every street.