Okay, hold on for a second ;-)
"Workable" condition to me means (1) sterile and (2) clean, and (3) without ghost. My explanation was on how I'd go about getting to that state fast without much work. The assumption was also (based on the provided first picture) that these pipes were in a reasonable condition already.
First, stems after an Oxyclean bath for 2 hours won't need 50 bristle cleaners. The most gunked up estate stem I have cleaned after the Oxyclean was 5 bristle cleaners until they came out as white as they went in. And yes, I have also cleaned estate stems without a previous Oxyclean bath, and yes I agree in that case you will need in the ballpark of at least 20 depending on the amount of gunk.
Second, salt and alcohol method has no further effect after 3 hours, as has been demonstrated multiple times across a variety of forums, and this is consistent with my experience. If you ream back the cake to wood, sand it smooth with 600 and do the salt/alc for 3 hours you are - usually - perfectly good to go. Yes, there is the occasional estate where grandpa collected 50 years of goopy cherry tobacco but let me tell you the amount of work needed to deghost that stuff is insane.
Third, yes: the alcohol bath will strip the grime, the finish and good parts of the stain off the pipe. Unless you want to keep the pipes "original" and go to great lengths of additional work to keep them as original as possible, this won't hurt. Remember, we are talking about quickest way to "workable"! You can always re-apply a Fiebings Ainiline dye stain in medium brown and/or Oxblood over the stripped wood to get back very close to the original colour. And just for the records, staining doesn't take ages either: apply generously, flame it, buff off, let dry for 20 minutes, buff off with white diamond and carnauba. Can be done in bulk, too.
That said, I have restored many estates to "like new" condition and if you want a perfect pipe, I agree the restoration job will required much much more work. The final 20% towards perfect take 80% of the overall effort, with most of the work going into restorative work (e.g., plugging burnouts or stem bite throughs), manual work (hand sanding with grits from 320 to 12,000) and efforts to preservation of original markings, colours and forms.
By the way - this is the current batch of estates (finished) I'm refurbishing, and some of these took up to 30 hours of work, e.g., the Comoy Prince, which had serious bite holes in the stem and some pretty deep scratches in the bowl that needed steaming out and re-sanding with 320, 400, 600, 800 and 1000 grit.
