Is professional tuning worth it?

[MartynB]

Agree with a lot of commenters here, too many to mention.

To summarise.

If you have the knowledge (now available for free on the internet), skills, insight, and tools, you can tune something yourself up to, and sometimes beyond, what you can buy from a professional. So do it.

If you lack any of those four things, paying someone else to do it who does have them may be a good idea.

Whether that is value for money or what you want is entirely up to you, and an emotional decision as well as a practical one.

Spot on, personally I would pay someone who has more knowledge than myself. I can do a basic strip, deburr, polish, re-lube and re-assemble. It would be smoother, probably a bit more consistant but unlikely to be a patch on what someone can do with the right knowledge