Small wideband amplified aerials are at best a compromise, at worst bloomin' awful (as you, the OP, have found). At HF at the atmospheric noise is quite high so anything with noise lower than that will work well. But you need quite a large signal handling capability, this can be noisy. Luckily for HF this more than cancels out. These days one of the better off the shelf opamps makes a good HF wideband (kHz to 10's of MHz) amplifier. We are blessed with people amplifying weeny signals from CMOS video chips cheaply for example.
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The NRD525 was one of the better amateur receivers of its day in terms of large signal handling, but it was not as much better as legend has it.
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The AOR 7030 was very good in that respect.