Yes, subjective. I guess I come at from the standpoint of having never in my whole life owned a brand new vehicle, I had one like 25k miles or something and had some warranty left, otherwise they were usually closer to 100k miles. And it seems to be true just as a sort of general statement, that at 10 yrs or 100k miles, probably there is going to be a bunch of stuff that needs to be changed out, but if you can get over that hump and address everything, then it seems like you are ok for a good while. My feeling is most people don't do the regular maintenance because if they did vehicles would be fine at basically any reasonable miles if they aren't rusted out because it's just parts, so to speak.
But on older vehicles if you don't do a lot of things yourself the labor will kill you. In the "olden days" it seems like there were a lot of home-garage type stuff where if you found a good mechanic, you'd keep going there, and sure they weren't free, but they were what I'd call reasonable, today, not so, or maybe I just haven't had the need for one yet and they are out there.
My dad used to say "If I do this myself compared to paying someone $100 to do it, that's just like I paid myself $100." I think it's even more true today with labor just crazy. A lot of stuff I've done, the labor would have been easily 2x or more the parts costs. I used to think my dad was pretty cheap until I started paying my own bills.
And that's why when I looked at the Mazda, even with 185k miles, it fit my price at the time, and I could see that compared to a lot of stuff especially new stuff, it'd be easy to work on for a lot of things. I fixed everything on it. It just didn't have 4x4 which I kind of wanted but after I got it I was like, pickups rock, and so I searched out the '97 and that didn't have much to do on it and I love it. I figure as a matter of course when you get a new used vehicle you are going to have to go over it and you will find stuff you have to do, that's just life. But if the parts are available and cheap and you can get to things, those are huge plusses. Granted some things are hard to get when they are old but generally speaking, for Rangers, they're available (mostly).
The other day I saw a nice '19 Ranger at a dealer, the problem is, you look at the price of that, compared to the 97, and you ask, what does it do that mine doesn't do? Maybe more dependable and less time messing with it.... that's about it, and vanity. Is that worth it? To a lot of people it is, just not to me. It might be a pipe dream, but I've been dreaming about making a build car for years, and to do that right by the time all is said and done you can have as much in it as a new upscale F150, but it'd be brand new (which I never had) plus if you built it you can fix it. I kind of draw the line on trans and engines, not saying never, but, that's getting really specialized. Time is always an issue. But if you had a blown engine, the shop manuals tell you how to tear down an engine and rebuild from the ground up.
People don't seem to understand that there are some parts that wear out by intention (like brake pads, oil, etc) and other things that are expected to wear out over time, so if you have a vehicle with a lot of miles, unless people kept it up, yeah, stuff will be worn out on it past what you would expect on a new(er) vehicle.
My other half is driving an '02 Lexus RX300 her dad gave her with 263k miles on it and everything works, starts/drives nice, fluids are all topped up, look clean.... that's as far as I went with it - but obviously he did maintenance or it never would be still driving. Other than stuff like checking tire pressure or charging a battery (her other vehicle sits mostly now) I defer work on a wife/gf vehicle to others. Call me mean, but my experience is they have no idea about things and won't until they go start pricing fixes.
Speaking of which, you ever get this? "we never go out anywhere" so I said a while back "we just went out over three streams, write that down".
Back when, she said she hates trucks so I said "I guess I'll be going 4x4 by myself". Then we took the '97 up some mild 4x4 and she seemed to enjoy getting out where there's nothing but woods. Today it's like spring here and she says "are we going 4x4 today?" and I'm like well I have a million dovetails to cut, that was kind of my plan. But it's tempting. Weather will suck mostly for a few months.
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