Deprecation costs of a new MH will always be more that repair and maintenance for an older MH on average. I say this because if you look at the deprecation curve for a MH you can see the knee of the curve is at 3-4 years(the greatest % of deprecation)after about 8 years or so it will drop to 6% for ever until it reaches scrap value. Your question is will the cost of repairs exceed the deprecation cost on a older MH. I think statistically the answer is no. In my case I bought an older MH and several of my friends bought brand new. I had what I thought was a lot of problems and spent what I thought was a lot of money fixing it and emotionally thought I should have bought a newer MH. But when I looked at the actual data, I spent $12,000 over 8 years of ownership in total for repairs and maintenance roughly half for repair half to maintain the MH. So I lost $6000 in repairs and $15,000 in deprecation in 8 years while my friends lost $30,000 in one year for deprecation just driving the MH of the lot. Older MH's can blow engines or transmissions as well as newer MH's but if you look at this statistically the cost of repairs will never come close to the deprecation loss of a newer MH.
