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...some bits of vintage electronics really are only fit for a skip, while other items are indeed extremely fine examples of the "art of electronics", which might deserve some effort to preserve.
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That's OK if you want to preserve the "art of electronics" itself. If you want to preserve history, especially social history, then you must take a more forgiving view. The products that shaped the progress of consumer electronics, especially, were often the ones that sold best, not the ones that worked best; the Garrard 301 was a fine turntable but few teenagers ever played their rock'n'roll singles on one.
One can judge the 'merit' of an electronic device along so many axes, with potentially conflicting results, that it is only ever going to be subjective and dependent on context, just as criticism of fine art is subjective (although perhaps for different reasons.) I always quote at this point the seemingly mundane but crucially important observation by architectural historian Siegfried Giedion: 'To the historian there are no banal things.'