Question about the price of 340s

I am a bit younger, meaning I wasn't driving age when my 70 Swinger 340 was new. We ended up with these cars in the mid-late 80's when they were beat to chit. We had to fix/rebuild them. What I remember was, (and this is in high school when I was a broke *** kid) there was a guy with a really cool 66 Chevelle small block , pretty quick, dad financed and built it for him. There was a guy with a slow /dog 71 Chevelle, it had a 350, and wasn't worked at all, the car just looked good, the guy was an ugly troll, always had chics in the car cause it was a Chevelle. The really fast cars were ran by the gear heads, a 66 Falcon, a 73 340 Duster, a 71 Charger with a big block. The chevys at least in High school weren't all that. I will say that the 5.0 Mustangs back then were pretty cool, but didn't get much respect from us punks, probably cause they were new. Now, I like my 86 Fox body convertible, its a hoot as a daily driver. But I digress, I guess my point is, I haven't seen any impressive Chevys not in my neck of the woods anyway, I do like certain ones though, Big block examples for instance. I do remember every 69 Camaro I saw with 302 badges on the hood had 350's in there as replacements...