@seymour-krelborn: I don’t disagree that when these records were the most common mass medium for consumer sound reproduction in the home, little attention was paid to quality or consistency. That old Monarch plant which is so highly regarded now was owned at one point by Viewlex (if memory serves), which also owned Buddah Records, a label not known for quality pressings.
I think the attention paid to quality (with exceptions for classical and some jazz during the era) really came after the vinyl LP lost its mainstream status and was declared dead. People were focused on finding extant copies and that led to a lot of retrospective examination of dead wax, pressing plants, mastering engineers and other factors-- things I don’t think people were concerned much about when the LP was a common commodity that you could buy at a local store or the mall for 6 bucks. Princeton Record Exchange was very busy once the CD mainstreamed, because in NY metro, they catered to the vinyl "purist" crowd and had the stock-- old RCA doggies, Mercury Living Presence, all the HP List stuff, etc.
I remember when Famous Blue Raincoat was an audiophile favorite, and nobody complained that it was a digital recording (Killer personnel on that one for sure). All that purist stuff came later, when people had to suss out whether a used record was a "good one." The Internet helped accelerate that too- crowd sourcing info on matrices, mastering engineer initials, pressing plant trivia, along with anecdotals comparing sonics. That’s where some of the earlier Hoffman threads on rock music really shine. You had a lot of compulsives who compared notes and shared when the records were still relatively cheap (but after The Death of Vinyl™)
I bought LZ II (US pressing) when it was released. I never checked the deadwax. (That copy is no longer in my possession).