I value more the rides that were "challenging" because they push the limits of what I can ride. My first 100km felt really hard, my first 400km felt really hard, but once you've done a distance it becomes much less of a mental challenge in itself. The ability to cope with adversity - weather, hills, mechanicals, whatever, just grows with experiencing these things and if you insulate yourself too much from troubles then you don't grow your ability to deal with them.
I didn't use a bag drop in the 2007 PBP, not because I thought there was anything wrong with the idea, just because I was too damn knackered when I got back to Loudeac to ride the extra few km to the camp site to get my bag. Having finished the ride in the one pair of shorts I now know -
1. It's perfectly possible to ride a 1200 un-supported without a bag drop.
2. My shorts don't smell very good at the end of it.
So if there's going to be an official bag drop this year then I'll happily use it. I know it won't make the ride any easier, but it'll make me smell marginally better when I get to the finish.
I think that if riding with a support team is all you do then you convince yourself that you've got to have support on long rides and therefore you limit yourself. Last summmer Salvatore managed a 1200, a 1500 and a good few thousand kms in between without any support. That's the kind of riding I admire and aspire to, but I think it'll take me a bit more experience of riding really long audaxes before I could leave the house for a whole summer without worrying about support.