Oh heck yeah. I'm a total Albion snob now. Between them and A&A, I'd have a hard time convincing myself to get a sword from anyone else now. It's funny, just about 5 or so years ago, I was saying I couldn't bring myself to spend $800+ on a sword. Now, it's the other way around.
There are other ways to get very good swords as well, including the custom sword makers out there, as well as getting a Christian Fletcher sword with an Angus Trim blade. But to me, Albion is pretty much the top maker of production line swords.
Albion's sword designs are based on careful study of museum originals. Except of course their Museum Line, all of their swords are their own design, but are meant to be representative examples of those types of swords from history, with an eye toward the modern market. That is, there were some really awful swords made back in the day as well as very good ones, so they're replicating the better characteristics from better examples.
They capture the proper internal structure, as well as blade geometry with all its subtleties like distal taper, cross section, fuller thickness, point thickness, etc. This means they feel good in the hand, move well, and cut well. The one thing where they "cheat" a little in the final product is that they harden the blade a little more than was typical back in the day.
While they use modern construction methods (most notably a CNC machine to mill out the blanks, as well as hot-peening with a blowtorch), it's in the spirit of historical construction. Period steel wasn't nearly as good, and had to be worked and folded to get the right carbon distribution. They can skip this step since modern steel is already correct. From there, the blanks were ground into blades historically, so the fact that they grind theirs with large belt grinders is actually not far off from what our ancestors did.
Check out this video done by "How it's Made" on the Discovery channel, filmed at Albion:
