The under-five-grand lane still exists, which is the good news. The bad news is that it no longer rewards lazy searching. The obvious bargains got discovered, reposted, and turned into content. The remaining ones are hiding in rough photos, weird locations, or model names the broader market still does not respect.
That is why old FireBlades, Buells, TLRs, and mildly scruffy Milles still matter. They are not cheap because they are bad. They are cheap because the people with money are shopping for safer nostalgia and easier validation.
A good under-five-grand bike now needs one of three things. It needs to be genuinely overlooked. It needs to be cosmetically rough enough to scare off Instagram shoppers. Or it needs to be mechanically intimidating in a way that filters out everyone except the buyers who already know the answer.
That does not mean the lane is dead. It means the lane is finally acting like a proper hunt. Which, if we are being honest, is part of the appeal.
The bikes worth buying at this money are the ones that still feel alive after the transaction. Not everything cheap qualifies. Enough of it still does.