Whether you like it or not, and for whatever reason you personally drive your car, you stick out like a sore thumb when doing it. Just the facts, that's the way it is. You may not be driving your car to say "look at me", but your car says it anyway just by being different from everything else on the road. I drive my Duster pretty much daily, and I drive a fleet of old cars because I love old cars. I couldn't care less if anyone noticed me, and the majority of the time I would prefer they didn't. That's why I don't go to shows, it's why I don't have 20k dollar paint jobs on my cars, I would prefer no one noticed. But that's not how it works.
As far as the original Duster in question goes, it would be pretty simple to return it to stock. A heck of a lot easier than it would be to drag some rusted hulk out of field and replace every inch of sheetmetal. So yes, whoever drives that car is saving a classic. Maybe not in the purist sense, but that car is doing a heck of a lot better in it's current shape than it would be rotting away in a yard somewhere. And not all of that particular style of cars are hacked up. Some are, absolutely. Just like anything else there's folks out there that know what they're doing and folks that don't. But that applies to cars right here on this forum too, I've seen plenty of sketchy crap right here, and even people arguing that their sketchy crap is fine without having any idea why it isn't. It's the same for everything - 4x4's, hot rods, street freaks, whatever- if there's a custom vehicle genre there are people that turn out hack jobs and people that turn out good work.
