Stupid? I think not.. Yes I could have bought a used Caravan for the
$2k I spent on the conversion but that's not a VW (yet). I could have
gotten a used VW engine for the $2k but that would have been the same
old problem.

Yeah, but with the Caravan you'd be doing tranny swaps every 40K miles instead of an engine swap. Despite what they say, Chrysler never got the transmission issues straightened out on the Caravan/Voyager-Just ask my neighbor who's owned 3 of them, and all have hed trans failures. In the mid 90's my company used Caravans ( I had one) and ALL of them had trans, failures.  Jeff