Yeah, buying a brand new engine is a big pill for an older machine. It's cheaper to find a used engine, but that takes some time to make sure it has the same specs (pto size/length, charging capacity, physical size), and then can require some fabrication work to make it work, such as altering the exhaust to make it fit in the available space.
For some machines, I would roll them to the dump, others I would take the time to either rebuild the engine or repower it, because I find that machine to be really useful to me (and I'm unlikely to find another one like it for similar effort/money).