Brett - I gave my last tube Transoceanic to EddyR a year or two ago... kept the solid state one, and kept some old farm tube radios that I've converted to run on a new power supply instead of a tractor battery.
The 1 volt tubes just got silly to find or pay for when you did find them as you noted.
I actually have found a pretty good supply of 1L6's which is the only really expensive one. 1U4, 1U5, 3V4, 1S5s are pretty cheap. The Loktals used in the 8g005 and Universal are $4 or so.
BTW, you may or may not know that some guy makes a solid-state replacement for the 1L6 that has far better sensitivity, and always works at low battery. But it's cheating. You can also replace the $50 1L6 with a $4 1LA6 (Loktal) with a little trickery, and their performance is nominally identical.
What I am not going to do is use 1L6s in my Philco and H503Y - no point, a 1R5 will work just as well on AM.
My favorite table top tube radio is an old Phillips I refurbished. Initially I grabbed it for its cool round dials, amazing woodwork and inlay's, but came to appreciate it for it's DX capabilities. It's actually a good radio, even by modern standards.
I have a Telefunken Opus 7 and a Blaupunkt (that I repairing to give away for Christmas - waiting on an Eye Tube from Mocba) for table radios, and they both completely blow away any hi-fi tuner I have for sensitivity and since they are mono, don't have any problem with multipath, unlike the stereo tuners. I also have a Zenith 5s319 and it, too, is awfully darn sensitive. None too selective, and on Shortwave it's almost impossible to tune because one dial covers 5.5-20 Mhz. Good thing I have the steady hand of a stunt flier...
For my stereo listening pleasure, the only ruskie equivelent to the 7189's Amperex that seem to hold up are the "military grade" or some such, because of the much higher voltage rating. My Scott 299b is really fussy about biasing, and will make any substandard tube (EL84 6bq5 just dont work! at least not for long...) plate glow red if I don't bias it right away and keep it running slightly below spec. Thats fine with me, they seem to run a hair cleaner sounding under bias'ed anyways. With efficient speakers, it's amazing how 25 watts can drive you out of the room as much as a modern 100watt amp.
The 299b is pretty sweet. I rebuilt some Scott equipment for some guy, and man, it had a lot of parts! I can slap an ST-70 together in an evening, it took a few weeks of evenings to just replace the critical parts in that Scott preamp. Sounds good when its working.
On a related topic, if you want to see some beautiful work, check out:
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=70681.0 Bill is a damn genius, I would haven't even attempted going down to bare metal on that Scott preamp. I just can't see how he did it, just from the pictures he took with no schematic.
I am currently running a Van Alstine Ultimate 70, and it gets about 33 watts/channel. It gets plenty loud enough and since the only Dynaco parts left are the chassis and the output iron, it doesn't sound "tubey" to any great extent. 33 watts/420 volts is well within capability of an El34/6CA7 so they are pretty reliable. Can't say the same for the rectifier tube, unfortunately. And I am not switching to a solid state rectifier without some sort of delay circuit. It's not exactly a match for my Insight+ 260hc but as tube amps go it's as good as I have ever heard regardless of money (including the second from the top VTL that had something like 16 6550s - per side).
I can easily imagine that you need something special to get 25 watts out of an hot EL84! Most EL84 amps are claimed to be 17 watts, but most actually measure around 12. I would guess that the B+ is around 340-350V and an EL84 is 300 max. As I recall the 7189 is around 400, which makes it very nervously close to the edge, but would certainly make short work of a EL84. I would actually be tempted to do the opposite - run the 7189 at about 280 in an EL-84 amp, give up the power but gain the reliability.
Someone makes an automatic bias control gadget for Dyna ST-35s, if I can find a reference it might be worth looking into for the Scott. Pushing it to that level, you really can't let the bias drift at all.
Brett