My pre-ordered HW97KT 1899 Limited Edition arrived last week. Performance-wise, after the first shot, which dieseled quite a bit, I chronographed the next 20 shots with JSB Exact Diablo 8.44 gr at an average velocity of 874 fps with an 18 fps spread and a standard deviation of 4. In my book, that's pretty darn good for a straight-out-of-the-box springer. Accuracy-wise, I haven't been able to shoot it at distances farther than 40' yet. At that range, it pretty much matched the groups of my more seasoned and broken-in high-end springers, getting small aspirin-sized 5-shot groups fairly easily with occasional strings of shots that were pellet-on-pellet. The recoil is fairly mild, the cocking stroke is buttery smooth, the twang and vibration is what you would expect from a new Weirauch but that should smooth out over time, and the only tweak I've performed so far is removing some second stage trigger creep with a couple small clockwise turns of the torx screw located at the front of the trigger block.
As far as how it looks, Weihrauch wisely chose to use the red laminate slats more sparingly than, for example, their blue laminate slats, so the 1899 doesn't look like a gaudy eye-sore (at least to me, it doesn't). As you can see in the close-ups below, for their blue laminate stocks they alternated 2-2 blue and gray, but with the 1899 it's 1-3 red and gray. Personally, I love it, but I also get why it wouldn't appeal to everyone.
So, to answer the OP's question, I think it was worth it.
