I've two of the NHS Cold/Single Pressed 'wide tip' decks in rotation; an 8.375x32.15x14.44WB with ACEs and SPFs for transition and an 8.25"x32"x14.44" for street/park.
There is a different feel to them...they feel less modern in away, a bit more solid with sort of an 80s feel to them; hard to explain...not at thin feeling as an R7, of which I'm also a fan, and certainly crispier feeling than a DLX board.
Running them through for a heat transfer seems sort against the point of a cold press tho.
Not really, a heat transfer takes like 5 seconds while heat curing is basically cooking the board. Heat transfers heat the graphic up and then use tons of pressure to apply it to the board, there's a small amount of heat transferred to the wood but its pretty negligible. Like I said think of it as putting an iron-on patch on something vs baking it. Heat transfer is the industry standard (as is cold pressing for high end boards) and 99% of whats on the market now uses it.
It's quite rare to see straight up screen printing direct onto a board because it's a lot harder to consistently make quality prints since there's so many variables... I worked in a commercial screen printing shop for years mixing ink and you can do everything exactly the same every time every time and it'll turn out different every time. And we were screening flat on printstock, deck printing uses these wild ass bent screen frames and jigs that I can only imagine must be hell to set up and maintain.
So please don't think that a heat transfer is making your board worse. Most people who do screens do it because its the old school way and it's a hands-on process that creates more individual pieces but the actual performance benefits are negligible, if any.