I’m not upset. You can do what you want. So by all means find a home for that old equipment. You’ll find plenty of folks like Mitch happy to take it off your hands.
But I assure you that as an N scale modeler since the 1980s and an HO modeler before that, and as an O gauge enthusiast since the early 1990s with dozens of scale 3-rail engines that I run regularly in command, I feel that you certainly are hardly enlightened in comparison when it comes to scale trains. If we count my childhood, I’ve got a 50-year pedigree in scale trains. That includes a scale NKP No. 765 Berk by MTH in O.
And yet I enjoy both, scale and traditional O. Makes life much more enjoyable.
And since Lionel and MTH are still making plenty of traditional equipment, and that Lionel’s all-time biggest seller is now (by far) the Polar Express set with its traditional-sized Berk (ironically modeled from the same family of locomotives you’re so proud of), I’m not sure there’s much validity in the notion that there has been some sort of evolution at all.
You’ll find me running my Lionel Polar Express traditional Berk at home and my MTH scale Berk at the club, perhaps on the same day, this Christmas. God, I enjoy not worrying about such realities!
