Reel Repair by Alan Tani

New Range Rovers are lease only vehicles. Older ones are cool looking but a way more expensive hobby than old fishing gear!

I got away from the Spincaster Push button with a 1950's Shakespeare 1756. Heavy and well-made. Called a "Spin-Wondereel", I call it an underspin. 9.5 oz, the heaviest of 6 spincasters I have.Those Shakespeare's I've seen from the same era, do have metal push buttons. The only plastic is the handle-knob.
Oudda the 6, the Johnson Century 100B is my all-around favorite.

The latest I got is the precursor to the Zebco 33 from 1949. R.D. Hull's Zebco Standard. Push a button on the middle of the body and you get a different kind of direct-drive; the rotor spins backwards on the cast, but the main gear/handle pops out and is disengaged. Re-engagement of the gears is by pushing the handle back in. So there is some casting friction from the rotor spinning backwards.
 No typical anti-reverse. There's a dome shaped plastic ball inside the body attached to the rotor shaft, accessible from the outside via a thumb hole for a drag effect or anti-reverse. Simple workable design with lots of room/areas for improvement, which were only a few years away.
Interestingly there is another button on the thin body; a clicker.
3-improvements were coming; a push button system to retract the rotor pick-up pin,  and at the same time raise the rotor to squeeze the line and hold it while casting, until the button is released. Next was a dial controlled friction drag and a more traditional anti-reverse cog and gear system.

They kinda do. They just cost a lot of money.

Inflation adjusted, a reel like this would probably cost in the ballpark of $200 today.

If someone produced these reels today for $200, do you think they would sell enough to have a viable business? I suspect the market has shown they will happily sacrifice a whole lot of robustness and longevity in exchange for performance and features. Consumers vote with their wallets and the suppliers march to that beat. Fundamentally, I suspect the vast majority of buyers have different priorities in a fishing reel to the average AT member.