I'm someone else who would've enjoyed collecting GA, under different conditions.
In the UK, and as a kid in the 70s, I didn't know of any dealers who specialised in the Age, and the stories I read in DC 100 pagers seemed completely unattainable here; just a pipe dream. Later on, as a high grade collector, the books were way too expensive and still too elusive for me to put together an extensive collection, although at one point I did have a few low grade Police Comics issues, which I'd picked up for the Cole Plastic Man stories.
Eventually, I settled for having the much cheaper DC Archive hardcovers.