The appeal for me is the vintage equipment and listening to music in a format as intended when it was recorded. I mostly don't listen to new music recorded after the 1980s on analogue format, I've got a set of headphones and my iPhone for that environment. I get the point that you may not enjoy the aspect of listening to it like that, but it's a matter of it being what it is, you're recreating the environment in which the music was recorded as it came off the press, especially with vinyl and reel to reel tape. Actually, I'm not sure if you've ever put your ear to the grooves on a record and actually heard music being played? You don't get that with the digital experience.
For what its worth, you don't have to "maintain" tubes, they're kinda like a light bulb, they either work as intended or they don't, and you can hear a bad valve in your system straight away without even looking at the filament, or whether its used or otherwise. But then some tubes depending on how you use them will last 20, 30 or even 50 years. Kind of like an old fashioned light bulb you see, when the filaments on a light bulb were designed consistently as they were with a valve lets say 50 years ago, they didn't burn out after a couple of months use. Today you chuck it out and put an LED light bulb in instead.
The maintenance thing of a tube amp is fairly straight forward also. A tube amplifier, especially a vintage one is made up of a series of components, resistors, capacitors, pots, and knobs, all of which can be maintained/replaced if you know what you're doing. They are all user serviceable parts and that's what brands such as Dynaco sold their amplifiers on the ability of. A simple person with not much knowledge and some skill with a soldering iron, a volt meter, pair of pliers wire cutters can fix their own amp.
If you buy a $100 solid state amplifier? It is what it is, usually if something fails, and you're not a small electronics repair person, you write it off for the cost of a failure and you buy a new component instead. That's the straight out laws of consumerism. Things are designed to be obsoleted. You can always maintain and upgrade a valve amplifier especially if you know what you're doing.
As to the merits of tubes on top of digital, there are no merits to be had in that environment. The only thing you're achieving is colour which I'm guessing in a sound science forum is not what you want to achieve? Although some people enjoy it, its not natural. The whole point of rolling tubes for me is recreating an environment, a listening space, or whatever you want to call it that gets closer to being as it was at the time the music was recorded.
I get there is a world of digital out there, and I enjoy that also for its ease of access and simplicity, I don't have to dig through a pile of vinyl to find what I want to listen to, I don't have to cue up a track either, but right now I'd rather be listening to some vinyl in my living room the old fashioned way. I listen to enough digital stuff on the go. Keep the digital for where it serves me best in terms of mobility, and leave my listening space the way it was and the way people were happy with before all of this consumerist nonsense came about.