Hello, I'm late as usual on this, been swamped the last few days.

Dave, those rigs are quite useable if you get a tuning aid.  The ARRL has a 
link to some QST articles which are available, if you know some club member 
or other electronics hobbyist that can construct a tuning aid for you. 
These are voltage-controlled oscillators that you can hook across a meter to 
get a tone which rises and falls with the meter movement.  You'll probably 
need something like that for your amp, although you can tune for "maximum 
power" with one of the accessible wattmeters if you can get your hands on 
one RF Concepts P2000CW or the LG TW1 talking wattmeter.

At one time, Handi-hams had tuning aids available for sale, but I don't know 
if they do now; their web page doesn't reference that any longer.

With the newer rigs, a good antenna and an auto-tuner, you can get by 
without a meter.  But, I'm an old timer and I treat my meter as a valuable 
helper in the shack.  The Kenwood TS-480 and TS-590 are completely 
accessible with the voice synthesizer chip; it reads menus, frequency, power 
level, mic and processor gains, filter settings etc.  The TS-2000 is almost 
as accessible.

But, I have used the older equipment with a tuning aid to tune the finals. 
Those older rigs didn't have all the menus, so they were in a sense simpler, 
if not necessarily as convenient to operate.

Steve, K8SP