If you can afford losing a bit of frequency stability, you can use a varicap instead and control it by voltage. Precise multiturn potentiometers are much cheaper. Or just buy a programmable clock signal generator based on PLL and then make it into a superhet (you can still have analog filtering and detection, but digital frequency synthesis so it can look more like a modern radio with frequency display).

There are so many options and all are very cool to explore.

> There are so many options and all are very cool to explore.

Very much agree, controlling a varicap via an MCU is a nice intermediate step of "digital tuning" without going all the way to SDR.