My experience with it is that it depends upon what you want to use it for. It was Django Reinhardt's first instrument. The best player IMHO was Johnny St. Cyr who used it in the Hot Five with Louis Armstrong. I have tried the Deering banjo ($1,000 model) and found that I liked the tri-cone National resophonic much better particularly for early jazz band playing. There is quite a lot of archived discussion about this on alt.music.banjo (a newsgroup on-line). The best 6-sring banjo I ever played was an old Gibson trap-door (very rare) from the twenties. It had that warm St. Cyr sound and worked for ragtime fingerpicking really well.

Possibly, you might experiment with it by getting a good tubaphone Vega pot or an Ome and putting a guitar neck on it. I always thought that the best combination would be the ringing sound of a Mastertone five-string with resonator and a guitar neck fashioned to it.

Frank Hamilton