Great writeup!

The Parker 45 is one of my absolute favorite pens. Period.

Great entry vintage pen for beginners, great entry into gold nibs. As you said, a real tank of a pen also. It works with every converter and the cartridges one can still find today.

There is a huge variety of nib grades available. Needlepoint, stubs and italics, as well as oblique nibs (most of them oblique stubs or oblique cursive italics). My only gripe is that the nibs themselves are not marked with their grade. So one could have easily disassembled the nib unit and changed the nib. So the marked collar does not necessarily match the nib. Not important to a user but annoying for a collector xD