Pepperidge Farm remembers when ATs without barrels were going for under $3k soon after the ATX came out and everyone was dumping their "obsolete" ATs for the new hotness...
Hindsight being 20/20 (or even 20/10) while I still really like my 2x AX308s and 1x AXMC I should never have sold my 2x ATs with both pistol grip and thumbhole stock sides to fund the AXs... I had 2x of every color stock side offered in both thumbhole and pistol grip flavors.
Looking back I can't believe I sold both ATs and gave up the classic AW/AT thumbhole look, I should have only bought 1x AX and kept 1x AT, and sometimes I think I should have just kept the 2x ATs and skipped the 2x AX308s and only picked up the AXMC.
While the idea of swapping one or both of my AX308s into a Vision chassis with a thumbhole buttstock is still very tempting to get some more modern chassis geometry but keep the classic thumbhole look, it would be quite difficult now as AT folder buttstocks are pretty hard to get as we're well past the brief period in time where lots of people here were dumping their AT folding buttstocks cheap after swapping out to AX buttstocks.
I started with 1x AE Mk3 I bought new from Mile High, then picked up a second AE Mk3 I bought used. Both AEs shot amazing but I sold both several years later for 2x ATs just because I wanted AW mags after trying some. If you're not swapping barrels frequently the 2x major differences frrom the AE to the AT are the small firing pin on the 2015+ AT and AW mags, plus the chassis being a little newer with flush cups vs HK hooks. IMO upgrading from the AE to AT was worth it just for the AW mags, they're awesome, and the small firing pin was a bonus even though I never had issues with cratered or pierced primers even with the large firing pins in my AEs.
Personally, I'm someone that hates having to rezero scopes and swap barrels because it seemed like every time I took the rifle out of the safe I wanted to use the barrel/caliber that was not on it at the moment, and because of that I can take or leave the quick change barrel feature. I'd rather have mutiple rifles in different calibers that are always ready to go even though that costs a bunch more money than a single rifle with multiple barrels you swap frequently. IMO the old torqued to 100 lb-ft barrel interface of the AE and AW is a better and more secure interface than the current quick change barrel system of the AT/AX/ATX/AXSR. I experimented with torquing the barrels on my ATs to 50 lb-ft before tightening the quicklock screw (didn't want to go with the full 100 lb-ft torque spec for the AE/AW actions with the H cut for the quick change feature in the AT action) and I did notice slightly better cold bore consistency as well as smaller groups when smacking the barrel with a rubber mallet between every shot compared to the barrel snapped on hand tight then torquing the quick lock screw, but that's a very limited test with very limited data points. AI obviously has faith in the quicklock system (as well as it being a contract requirement for a couple of programs they submitted rifles for.)
Back when I sold my AEs and upgraded to ATs I think it cost me about $600 per rifle to sell the AE and get into the AT. To me that was worth it. It's going to cost more than $600 to upgrade today though.
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