Record hunting is an adventure that rewards with knowledge about music history, label history and a lot of arcane details that will not win you any friends at cocktail parties.
Used to be, a province of bin divers looking for original pressings by matrix number. That ship has sailed for the most part due to price and grade inflation.
Chad is a pretty significant figure in the vinyl revival—he went from used record dealer to reissue house to dominant force during the Death of Vinyl.
There were others- Hobson, from Classic Records, MoFi (old and ‘new’), Craft (which is an amalgamation of old jazz labels). But there’s precedent for these- going back to the early days of hi-fi, like Nunn/Audiophile label and HiFi Recordings (Arthur Lyman/Yellowbird) and successors like Speaker’s Corner, Music Matters and now, Tone Poet.
Chad’s contribution can’t be downplayed but he limits releases to what he likes—if you are filling in rock warhorses, and jazz standards and classical, he has long held a primary place. But some of the great ones- the Hoffman Gray jazz staples like Art Pepper and Sonny Rollins are themselves pricey today.
Treat it like an exploration of musical terrain and you’ll find that you are doing more than buying artifacts (or copies of artifacts). With the price of some collectibles through the roof, you’ll also find some less well known bargains-the reissue of Jothan Callins Winds of Change is a marvel and allows you access to an unobtainable record; ditto, Kogan/Beethoven Violin Concertos from EMI/Columbia reissued by Testament. Some of this stuff appears in reviews but a lot is found in the hunt. You’ll also see that there are deep pockets of knowledge by genre or subgenre--someone steeped in prog rock isn’t necessarily going to know mainstream rock, let alone classical.There are also sources for this stuff you discover-- the guy in the UK who specializes in golden era Decca or the occasional "pop up" seller who has a stash of rare records he found in a dumpster outside of a foreclosed studio.
You’ll have to cross the bridge of record cleaning and care at some point. You need to find a process you can live with, isn’t inordinately complex (or you won’t do it) and does no harm. You could devote a career just to that topic but it isn’t necessary; there are good practices.
I’ve gone to extremes of tens of thousands of records to maintaining a smaller but highly curated accumulation—I never considered myself a serious collector, but the process itself is an education and you discover, I think, that your musical taste is broader than you once thought. That’s part of the joy of the hunt and the reward is a large collection that you can tap without running to the record store or hunting down a copy on Discogs.