Absolutely. If you fish four days a week, and depend on winning matches fished at "one bat and it's back in your hand" range for your bait'n'beer money, then a "contracted" pin is probably unbeatable - I seem to remember people like Billy Makin and Dave Thomas switching back to pins for certain types of match-fishing, and they wouldn't have done that without good reason - but for "once per fortnight, per haps" types, the daily learning curve is too steep, and by the time you're fishing as well as you want to, all the fish have laughed themselves stupid and taken to their winter quarters for a lie-down.
You mention the cold - for a lot of fishing, decent bakelite or wooden reels can still deliver the goods without being painful to touch. Desperately unfashionable, but utterly functional.
My big regret (ok, one of my small-to-medium ones) is that when ebay was new and wonderful, someone sold two wooden Nottingham reels that had belonged to Frank Buckland. Thinking I could never afford them, I didn't bother to follow the auction, and if I remember aright, they sold for low sixties, which at the time I could have scraped together.
Grrr.