Having complete Hostess boxes is most preferable. Complete boxes check off two collectible areas; cards and food products. Swanson's TV dinner boxes from the 1960's have been selling from $75-$150. Those are just pictures of meatloaf and mashed potatoes! No cards. Hostess combines the food product of a bygone era along with great looking baseball cards. Future is strong there IMO.
If putting together a collection, I would recommend an example of each product, ie. Twinkies, Cupcakes, HoHo's, etc... Chocodiles boxes are pretty hard to find. Having a display with the different products, along with the different years, would look pretty neat.
Complete panels are great as well. The full bottom panel that has the Sporting News ad, bar code, and offer for batting gloves still in tact is the coolest looking IMO.
I would much rather have a complete box with my favorite player on it than a cut up PSA 9. I'm not much interested in the opinion of a guy in California...the complete box is far more interesting....although as noted by a gentleman above, money can be made by cutting them up as that is all part of the game.
I personally cringe seeing the boxes cut up, but to each their own.
Hostess Eddie Murray and Ozzie Smith rookies are much, much harder to find than their Topps counterparts. Finding their panels and complete boxes are really tough. I personally got bored of looking at the Topps cards from that era as I've handled them a million times over and they will survive earth's next extinction event just by sheer numbers alone
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Here is a 1978 store display piece(NFS).