I think it's really only the MiniDV deck that fails on the SR-VS30U, You can actually totally unplug it internally from the power supply and the main board and the VHS side will operate just fine without it being there. Beauty of the SR-VS30U is that a lot of them were probably taken out of service when the miniDV side failed, and there's a good chance that the VHS side wasn't used as much. The SR-VS30U has a loading belt that likes to fail, but it's the easiest ever to change with no tools required after you take the top case off and you can use cheap Amazon variety pack belts to replace them. The SR-VS30U is less known as having a TBC because there's no button on the outside for it, so you do need the remote to be able to enable/disable it is really the only other slight downside. SR-VS30U is also kind of nice in that it has dual outputs for S-Video and composite, so you could technically capture with two different capture PCs/setups during the same playback both via S-Video, which is nice for comparisons. Even the 7600-99xxu's didn't have the dual S-video outputs.

It's a bit up to preference rather than better worse really but image quality on it's own is generallly good on them yeah, at least personally I'm a bit iffy on the models past 2000 due to several issues with later models. Be aware that some of the very last generation models (with last mechanism) are known to often or always have issues with linear audio so be vary of those if you are doing something that has linear audio (for tapes with hifi audio it's fine.) Some of the early 2000s models before that can have issues with the dropout masking not quite working as one would expect which kinda ruins things as well.

I wouldn't say the omission of the dynamic drum is necessarily a bad thing these days, the originals like to fail which can render the entire VCR useless. You can remove the gears that crack and that'll *usually* make it work again.

I say USUALLY because out of the 3 dynamic drum VCRs I've tested, two had bad dynamic drums, one was fixable by removing the gears, one continued to not work after removing the gears, and the last one had an already working dynamic drum. Luckily I had a different model as a known parts unit that wouldn't power up at all and the dynamic drum motor assembly with the gears also removed did bring back the other one.

I'm very tempted to remove the gears on the working dynamic drum unit (disabling that feature) just to lessen the risk that it'll fail and not be fixable.