Yes. I can see what you mean. At 15 yrs old, 175 bucks is a lot and you're not gonna be happy to shell out another 175 quickly if your engine does turn out to be a dud. I don't think that happens all that much. But some of these engines were assembled poorly. You'll want to protect yourself against that.
So you'll probably want to follow in the footsteps of those who dis-assemble the top end, at least, and make sure that all is well before running it.
I think our friend Maniac, above, is one of those guys. (I've seen him give some good advice, by the way). Follow some of his threads and you'll learn a bit about that.
Or you might go to the 'search' box at the top of these pages and type in 'changing the piston' or something like that. It'll put you on the trail of threads that deal with this.
Top end disassembly is not a bad idea. One of these days I'm going to do it myself. I haven't gotten around to it yet. But it seems like it shouldn't oughta be too hard.