I think this depends how obsessive on making a perfect truck and how handy you are with a welder. Even if you pull the most perfect truck out of Southern California that's never had a body job, it's still going to have some minor perforations somewhere in it. I still ended up replacing the floors and repairing cab corners, but you could have probably just covered them over with some minor patching.
I'd just start with what you have if you are capable because most anything you're going to look at, unless it's near perfect or has already been repaired is going to need work, unless you can find something that's in better condition. Whether it's an inch of rot, or 6 inches in the rocker, you're still going to buy the entire rocker unless you're making your own patch panels.
