[Arran]

I bought one of the glass dials from Radio Daze, it was accurate and well done, why they have to reproduce their new ones on plexiglas is beyond me as plastic is more costly then real glass.

A totally uninformed guess from me suggests they may have had shipping troubles with the glass? Or making one fumble in the shop wipes out thousands of dollars in inventory? I know if I were the seller I would at least consider plex--I had a 40-180 chassis arrive in great shape, save for the broken dial glass.

No, it was because their original supplier for the glass dials went out of business and supposedly the company they hired as a replacement was turning out substandard work so they switched to plastic. In truth I think that the real reason was that they found someone who would reproduce dials on plastic and stopped looking. I bought a glass from them a few years ago and it was well packed, it was sandwiched between two pieces of soft styrofoam and suspended in packing peanuts inside the box. I bought a dial from someone else and they pretty much did the same but packed the sandwiched dial between two pieces of stiff cardboard inside a padded envelope. It's very easy to avoid breaking a dial glass, as long as the glass can't be struck with a hard blow or crushed they don't usually break. It really isn't anymore difficult then packing glass tubes.
A dial mounted on a chassis or a cabinet is a very different story, but even so as long as it can't move and can't be struck, more often then not they survive if packed properly. If the chassis is bumping around in the cabinet like a slide hammer or somebody does something stupid like wedges packing material between the dial and and something like the outside of the box, then it will break. I stopped buying sets over fleabay precisely because of incompetent packing methods.
Regards
Arran