Buck,
The rebarrel shouldn't appreciably affect the value of the gun in the condition you describe, and you can certainly save the barrel to put back on the gun if you think otherwise. If you don't, and are willing to experiment, see if you can get the use of a borescope to check out the throat. If it's not destroyed, I would consider recrowning before I'd give up on it. If it is destroyed, you don't care if you make things worse, so trying a little light firelapping with 400 grit abrasive to clean the throat up and see if that smooths out. David Tubb claims he can double throat life that way with his kits, but you can roll your own.
I've twice had commercial production barrels, one from Remington in .222 and one from Savage in .308, that would consistently shoot under 3/8 moa (with tuned loads) as they came from the factory. So I'm not convinced you always get what you pay for in high end barrels. If you are competing in benchrest, and need to get your groups tighter than that, then more expensive barrels may have some appeal. Even those can be screwed up by poor chambering, though, so be sure you have a smith who cares about that part of the job and gets you a truly bore-axis concentric chamber and throat.
John Krieger has a note on his web site saying that, even though he is making 5R barrels in limited calibers, he can't detect any advantage. He's just responding to demand. I think that when 5R was selected for the M24 sniper system, that gave it a huge publicity advantage. (Maybe Boots Obermeyer (another barrel maker name for you) was consulted on that project; I don't know?)
I have to say that some of the barrel life reports on the M24 have been almost impossible to believe. Fellows getting 15,000 or even 20,000 rounds and still grouping 1/2 moa. Normal service rifle match life for a .308 barrel is about 3,000 rounds for chrome-moly steel, and 3500 for stainless. That includes almost 40%-50% of the rounds being shot rapid fire, which heats things up a lot more than sniper slow fire. Still, getting over 5,000 rounds is exceptional even without rapid fire.
I have no idea what the 5R aspect has to do with that long barrel life, if anything, since I don't know what steel they are using or how it's treated. I do know from the one Gunsite class I took under sniper instructors, that standard sniper training includes cleaning every 10 rounds, which may affect life by removing carbon before it hardens (see post 25,
here). Lots of folks comment that many barrels are ruined by over-cleaning, and I've seen more than a few of those looking through racks of well-used service rifles, but I think that's mainly due to bad cleaning technique and equipment.
