I agree with you fiddler, early on in my collecting, I let Garand's get away on me so to speak.
That's why I've nabbed an SVT and an M44 while they are plentiful.
When M38's were cheap, yet seemingly not plentiful, I bought one in an M44 stock and one in a wartime M38 stock.
At the time they were just interesting variants to me, I actually find them more interesting than M44's.
If I recall correctly, when I bought the M38's, RC k98k's were the fad, and everyone was #####ing that $350 was outrageous for an RC!