I haven't cancelled the power amp sim, but it's on the back burner right now while I clear out a bunch of other things.
So this revision of the Deep Dish isn't actually removing things, it's removing things that were never there. When I designed the version that's in use right now I designed in a bunch of "just in case" features that weren't present in the original LA-1A, but were designed to address hypothetical problems that never ended up happening. I'm not removing more thigns from the original LA-1A design, I'm removing things that were never in the LA-1A to begin with. So the circuit that is getting built isn't actually changing, I'm just de-cluttering the board of things I put in just in case and ended up not needing. The sound is exactly the same as it was before, it just saves me a couple minutes when I'm building it because I don't have to work around my "just in case" parts.
Also I'm not sure what you mean by tube buffer, LA-1A doesn't really have a buffer. I dropped one of the parallel tubes from the input section and took out the boost (and boosted the overall output instead), that was it.