Welcome aboard, Bill! Always glad to have another like mind around.
Please, don't be afraid to ask questions. We were all newbies once, so we'll go easy on you!
I would say that the D&D Steamboats, while not identical in all ways to the original deck, is actually a reasonably faithful recreation, right down to the smooth texture of the paper. They're closer to the original than the ones that USPC themselves printed in the late 2000s, because those were embossed rather than smooth! The Bucks even used the same jokers, at least as were used in the later iterations of the deck that were less racially offensive (early Steamboat jokers had some artwork depicting black people in a racist-stereotypical fashion).
The coating would be a major difference, though. All late-model custom decks have a coating called "Magic Finish" as the default. A designer has to actually request the standard finish to receive it from USPC for their project! It's something I refer to as "the great equalizer" due to how most custom decks handle very close to identically right out of the box. The recently-curtailed variety of stock thickness also contributed to the trend of most custom cards feelling the same as most other custom cards made in the past few years.
And if I'm not mistaken, I think the Buck Twins used a faux-aged look with a slightly dingy background color. I don't know how faithful that is to the original, but I'm inclined to guess that it isn't authentic at all to a fresh-out-of-the-box pack of Steamboats from one of the original print runs.
Well, please - tell us a bit more about yourself! Did you get to see the old Cincinnati plant while it was still in operation? What kind of decks do you tend to collect? If a train traveling from New York at a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour makes no stops en route to Albuquerque...wait, never mind that one...