Perhaps what could be studied could be the "culture" of craftsman and apprentice. If you look at any "community" of gearheads, you're going to find master craftsmen and apprentices creating the top-shelf goods, and a factory of assembly-linee workers creating the pieces which keep the company afloat.
This is true for most, if not all, groups with shared interests, such as this one. Photography has Leica, Hasselblad, Rollei, among others, for the rollfilm cameras. Custom builders of sheet film cameras are just as sought after as custom bicycle frame builders, and the materials are hardware-store common, but it's the attention to detail which sets apart one from the other. A Wisener will take exactly the same photo as a used Nagaoka, the same goes for a modern assembly line Shen Hao and a Linhof Technical camera. Same photo, and in the case of the latter two, both are assembly line cameras. To what end though? You can make the exact same photo with a used Nikon FM10 (Cosina production) as you can with a limited edition SP 2005. The Nikon reissue of the S3 and the SP, along with their respective lenses would be a good place to look into how a cutting edge company had to completely reverse engineer the camera since all of the original tooling and original designers were gone. Much early production was hand-fitted, so there were only guidelines to the material specification, and rigid adherence to results.
There are examples like this across user/collector communities around the world. One thing you're going to have to reconcile is the access question and how preservation of a now-bespoke-technique speaks to who had access in the past, and who has access today. This is possibly the more important question, as there are some parts of the past which should be remembered, but definitely not put into current production by anyone.