It's a daunting job, but doable. I've done many thousands by working a spare (otherwise, TV) hour or two every day with an Epson scanner using a six-slide holder. You'll be surprised how many you can do in a piece of an evening! However, you'll save a lot of effort if you first go through the slides ruthlessly choosing to keep only the real winners or especially meaningful ones.

I do: I still have over 10,000 of 'em, even though they have long since been scanned to nice fat digital files. Better yet, I have fond memories of K120 6x7 and 6x9 transparencies, shot by my Graflex XL cameras and Zeiss/Voightlander lenses. I still have the cameras, but I've gotta sat that any one who still prefers hour after hour of making Cibachrome prints in a pitch black darkroom to sitting in front of a computer with a nice Canon medium-format printer by his side is a (perhaps unrecognized) masochist.

You've got to take a heck of a huge bunch of pictures before the 'build quality vs price' factor comes into play. The 1.8 takes gorgeous photographs, and has a hidden benefit: because of its simpler and more symmetrical element structure (I guess?) it makes a terrific macro lens at the end of tubes or bellows.