Thanks for your detailed response. The reason I asked is because I've read all of your posts and some of you observations of the Mark V I didn't agree with and I was wondering how you came to those conclusions. In the end I just think its subjective. I get the ice pick sound you called out on the "edge" mode, but I think it is easily tamed by taking the tone of my guitar down to 3 then I think 1) the ice pick is gone, and 2) it sounds pretty decent. I do not find the "tweed" sound to be ice picky at all. In fact, I think its a decent representation of a tweed amp, but then it could be argued that my opinion is subjective. Which is fine because I would probably agree. The biggest thing for me on the Mark V is I think it probably sounds better as a head and closed back 4-12 setup. Maybe someday I will be able to confirm that. Even with that, my general preference for speakers is the 20w Greenbacks. I like them better than the typical G12M 25 75Hz's. Finding that in a 4-12 might be hard.
When I got my Mark V I felt that it was the best amp I have owned. I have owned several Fender's including several 60's black/silver bassman amps, a 1969 Bandmaster Reverb that had an awesome clean tone, one of those brown 90's Vibroverb Reverb reissues, and a 1966 Super Reverb. I found that Fender was not enough for me because they are single channel made to be clean amps. I don't like to front load amps so I always hated the drive sound on those amps because of pedals. In general I could not afford Marshall's back in the day because they were "the" hot amp and where I could buy black panel Bassman amps all day long for $125 a Marshall was (if I remember correctly) $400-600. I did, however own a 76 Marshall JMP Master Volume. I thought that amp sounded bad. First it was a Korg distributed amp from what I remember, and what they were doing at the time was deleting the EL34 power tubes in favor of 6550's. 6550's are a very ridged tube, and were not very flattering on that amp...again subjective, but not for me.
I am very much a guitar/amp player. I don't use effects at all. I rarely use the built in reverb on amps. When I saw this Mark V for sale at $1,400 I jumped all over it. I think any Mark you can get for that price is worth it. I usually only use channel 1 or channel 2. I almost never use 3 as 3 has too much gain for me. I do like the amp, but Mesa does pull some marketing crap with their amps. I remember thinking when I got the amp that it wasn't that loud. Eventually I hooked up my scope, tone generator, load resistor, and DMM and performed a little ohm's law to see what the output of that amp was. I don't have the results anymore, but I can say its nowhere near the advertised 90, 45, 10. No mode or channel was able to hit those outputs. That kinda felt like a trend with Mesa because I don't even need to measure a Mark V 25 to know there is no way that amp can do 25w. 2 EL84's are not mechanically capable of producing 25w.
In the end I subjectively would say that I have the best modern Mark. I like the non-repeated modes, I like the tube rectifier to be in the amp, I like the idea of the solo knob, Triode mode adds flavor, I like the variac mode, I have no desire for MIDI or cab clone features so the VII does not appeal to me. I also am curious to understand how they did the bias for the EL34's on the VII. There is this whole procedure that you follow on the V to use EL34, but on the VII you just flip the switch and you are good to go. They do really come close to trashing the idea of running the amp with EL34's in the VII the way the manual reads. "If you run the EL34 tubes plan on keeping a spare set of tubes with you and fuses". "The 6L6 in our opinion is a superior tube". Etc. I'm not suggesting the EL34 is better in the amp because I didn't really care for it, but I find it odd that they downplay using them in the VII manual or at least that is how I took it. Anyhow, thanks and I do like the write-up and even though I don't agree with some of it, it is interesting to read other perspectives.
all just one player's opinion. 
