I bought a nice HP 3478A for $125 (including ship) on ebay for my first bench meter (you can get them cheaper, perhaps around $75 if you are patient). I really like it a lot. Very fast measurements in 5 1/2 mode (insane fast at 4 1/2). Had to change out the internal calibration memory backup battery though, but that was actually quite fun (and excellent info on this forum regarding that). I lost the calibration constants because of a solder bridge though.
Build quality of these older HP meters are excellent... super clean. Dave has a teardown video of one. I don't mind the LCD display at all. It's super easy to read if you have decent light on your bench (although I do prefer the VFD displays of the 34401A).
Since I screwed the cal on the 3478 I decided to buy an HP 34401A that was calibrated and use it as a transfer standard. I learned a lot in the process, i.e. how to build low noise, stable, adjustable voltage and current references. Oh, then I started playing around with the SCPI interface (via RS232 -> USB converter) using Putty as the terminal. That was a mistake.
There is something really fun about sending simple text commands to the meter and seeing the results come back. I liked the simplicity of it... knowing that if I need to do a simple measurement in the future I won't have to rely on installing IVI drivers and an SDK, dealing with possible driver bugs, OEMs going out of business and not supporting the software stack for my current OS, etc... because it's just plain ascii text. And the SCPI commands are superbly documented in the 34401A user manual. I wouldn't recommend IVI libraries if you didn't need the abstraction layer. I wrote a tiny SCPI interface layer in C# that is about 50 or so lines long... will post on github in a few days. I liked everything about the 34401A so much that I ended up buying 3 more.
I played around with free version of benchview and noticed that there is a time limit (30 mins?) on how long you can log data... to go longer you have to pay for an upgrade. I think the upgrade price was reasonable though, and the software was nice. something to keep in mind though.
I have been very happy with the 34401A and the 3478A. But if you wanted to save some money, and didn't want or need the logging ability, you could go with one or two HP 3478A's and maybe have spare change.