I don't know, Tom - although the M-36 is a pretty spare boat, for sure, $400+K or whatever they're going for this week seems pretty "high end", to me, for a 36-footer I can't even come close to standing up in, and with a reefer and galley marginal for anything beyond weekend use... (grin) And, I can't even begin to imagine the impossibility of going off cruising for a year in boats finished to such a standard, and trying to keep it looking good... Boats like that are meant to be looked at, and sailed in carefully controlled conditions, not taken to distant places and lived aboard for extended periods of time...

But I would hardly consider Chuck Paine's designs for Morris such as the 36' Justine chunky or clunky, they look beautifully proportioned to my eye, I have no doubt they would sail well enough to satisfy me, the sort of boat that would take care of her crew in a real blow and be comfortable and safe offshore... wide side decks with nice bulwarks, I realize all that stuff has now become passe', but I look at a boat like that and imagine sailing day after day after day on a tradewind passage, a boat that will track beautifully and require minimal input on the self-steering gear... And, the more recent Morris deck salon designs like REINDEER and FIREFLY, I think are just amazing boats, such a boat would definitely make my short list were I ever to hit the lottery, and I would think if you couldn't be thrilled by sailing one of those, well, there's no hope for you... (grin)

As for what the future will bring, I have no idea... The deck salon definitely seems here to stay, people seem to have a real craving now for some of that Euro Trash shaped like a gigantic suppository... I think a builder like Hanse might become the next hot ticket, some say they "sail circles around everything else" (grin), the ease of the self-tacking jib is a big selling point, despite its unsuitability for sailing in a wide variety of conditions... Wide, high freeboard gives tons of interior volume, 3 staterooms/2 heads in a 40 footer with easy chairs instead of sea berths, what's not to like? No exterior wood to maintain, cool stuff like dual helms catches the buyer's eye today, easily overriding the likelihood they would be a very uncomfortable and tiring boat to sail offshore... No worries about things like saildrives, the buyer will have traded up to something else long before their servicing/maintenance/replacement becomes an issue... So, perhaps that's the future, some sort of Disposable Hybrid... (grin)

As always with these sorts of discussions, we really first have to define the sort of cruising we're talking about... I'm usually thinking primarily about about extended cruising, passagemaking, etc - obviously very different requirements from a boat than those used primarily for more coastal explorations of shorter duration that comes closer to the sort of cruising that most of us here appear to do...