Seems to me, that there are many different types of people in this, uh, "hobby," just like in every other form of collecting stuff.
There's the elitist, who has the means to purchase a bike way out of range for anyone else, who seems to find more joy in the ability to acquire and display (and brag) about what they have and you don't, and look at their bikes as property.
There's collectors who've chosen bikes as their main interest, who'll buy the rare bikes they can afford, mostly already restored or original, who fill room after room with their treasures...
There's the serious enthusiast, that collect, ride, restore, just because they love bikes, without the museum attitude of "look but don't touch."
The hobbyist who loves bikes, and the pride of bringing rust back to life, who shows off his work not to lord it over anyone else, but to say, "check out what I've built," because he's just happy to have people share his enthusiasm.
And there's just people who love old bikes. Rich or poor, they just want something cool to ride that isn't a mass market piece of crap. They may need that $500 rusty pedal to make their bike complete, but realise that it doesn't really matter when they're riding to the liquor store.
There's the bike flipper/ butcher, parter outer who knows everything about bikes and thinks it's still 1995 and it's a seller's market, who watches storage wars and believes that his bikes are actually worth that much.
We all want to be the guy who gets the "old bike for sale" craigslist score, or the "I found this at the dump" guy who rides away with the gold plated buster brown schwinn.
The guy who knows nothing, finds his grandma's bike in the shed and only wants to know "what's this worth." It could be anything, a bike, a toaster, a sow's ear purse. It's only a price tag he's interested in.
And then there's the rest. People who love bikes. Yeah, cool, you got that 100% complete, original, only one in existence bike that Tesla designed, the Wright Bothers built, and Einstein autographed, that defies gravity and is a perpetual motion machine, and we ask if you wanna go riding at the boardwalk alongside our rusty-ass, mis-matched Colson/Roadmaster hybrid with a ripped seat off your sister's huffy.