The He-10 was a pretty good receiver considering the price. It was
conventional and did not use a regen if.

Perhaps the reason to use full if gain for am would be to allow the s-meter
to read accurately and also allow the avc to work effectively.

The if gain and the rf gain do basically the same thing. If there are
really strong signals, you would like to reduce the gain before the first rf
stage to prevent overloading of the rf amp and mixer. However, a gain
control in the rf amp can affect noise figure and signal handling. Perhaps
the engineers working on it were not satisfied with the signal handling
capacity when they changed the parameters of the rf amp with the rf gain
control (I suspect that is the reson).

Performance would be equivalent to the Hallicrafters SX-99. It was a
physical copy of the old S-38. Note that the tube line up shows that remote
and semi-remote pentodes were used rather than sharp cutoff, so the radio
was designed to perform as well as it could for the price.

Colin K7FM