[turf3]

Some manufacturers are known to spend less time and care on the details of their less expensive instruments, and "less expensive" is also often equated with plated tubes and mechanisms.

Other manufacturers (Miyazawa, for one) make a point of saying that their plated-body instruments are just as "handmade" as their all-silver ones.

Frankly, nickel alloy silver plated is a BETTER choice for mechanism (it's harder and more wear-resistant) and tube (more dent-resistant) and it's actually more expensive to use silver plated nickel alloy than sterling as it's harder and will wear tooling faster, plus the added cost of the plating operation.

In the end, I expect you will not be able to tell a difference between how a plated-tube and a silver-tube Muramatsu plays. If you can, pick the one you like better.

 

[turf3]

Personally if I were in the market for a flute I'd do what I did when I was in the market about 20 years ago: try all the signficant high quality manufacturers.

For me, at the time, that boiled down to plated body and mechanism/silver head flutes (because most makers only offer a choice of headjoint cuts with solid silver head joints) from Muramatsu, Miyazawa, Sankyo, Yamaha, and Powell (I think it was "Sonare"?).

The Yamaha fell out first, despite being a really nice flute, it just wasn't as rich sounding as the others.

After using up every minute of trial time at home, I finally pulled the trigger on the Miyazawa and have never regretted.

 

[turf3]

No.
But if re-soldering of post ribs or rings or tenon socket is ever required as part of a repair, that will be a whole heap more difficult with a silver body.
.

Don't you mean that re-soldering would be more difficult on a plated body? (not really harder to make a strong joint, but harder to make it inconspicuous)