Heh, well... That Mac IIfx you bought was pretty serious box. Dang, that thing would run all the way up to System 7.6.1 and not act like a boat anchor.
Even after Apple discontinued the IIfx it wasn’t surpassed in performance until the Quadra 840av which was even more expensive than what you paid. Also, there was about year and a half long window of opportunity where you could have paid another $400 to upgrade your IIfx’s core with the 50mhz version and overclock the board and you’d own an outdated machine still faster than Apple’s new Quadra 840av. Do you remember the detractors to the Quadra 840av complaining to Apple about that?
That date range you bought it in was a time when the RISC vs CISC processor war was on a violent upswing. Huge tech leaps being done at the time. You could have even bought an Orange board to fill an expansion slot in your IIfx to add an Intel processor — Like a 486 DX2/66 or whatever it was then — and run MS Windows/DOS if you needed to.
Hey, if you still have that IIfx you might be able to sell it for several hundred bucks to a collector. I’m sure you got your money out of that if you were in desktop publishing at the time.
Depends on many factors, as with any vintage hobby. There is a healthy vintage Apple hobby market. I'm a collector. There's currently a Apple II on eBay for nearly $20G. One guy is selling just the CPU chip for an early Apple II for $1000 (and using a picture of the 1977 model I had sold to someone else but I made my money on it). Another chip for $500. Yes, people are trading to obtain chips to keep these machines going. Even though the machines like the IIfx are painfully underpowered compared to what is available now, people still are enjoying them.