Long time viewer... back when you used your R8500 and a RadioShack amplified speaker. Early on, I found fine frequency resolution and IF shift to make a huge difference after a proper wire antenna with a preselector.
You share fantastic information for beginners. Maybe you could record a tutorial video about all amateur and broadcast bands. What are their properties and at what time of the day can they be listened to?
I find SSB is really useful for shortwave and medium wave broadcasts as well. It gives you another option to kind of reconstruct those weak signals. I do find that on radios without it, depending on the signal, you can still kind of tell what hams are saying, and I can usually even pick up a few ft8 decodes. So it may be worth going through those bands even if you don’t have that feature!