I've identified a part of English speech where I always become stuck. Some examples will illustrate:

"He's as great a man as you will ever find." // Fine

"It's as good an option as you could hope for." // Fine

"It's as wise a decision you could've made in the circumstances." // Fine

I've looked this up and the words "man", "option" and "decision" are said to be the postcedents, and the first word of each sentence (which is a personal pronoun), are said to be cataphors. Confer anaphora and antecedent for opposites.

Now the problem arises (as I see it) if you try to use this same construction or pattern with the postcedent in each example in the plural form.

"They're as great [a] men as you will ever find."

"They're as good [an] options as you could hope for."

"They're as wise [a] decisions you could've made in the circumstances."

Whenever I find myself verbally walking down one of these paths, I get to the first indefinite article, and have to stop, all confused, and have to tread back to the start to reconstruct the sentence a different way.

Also, this doesn't just happen when using a pronoun. For example:

"The Chief Justice is as moral a man as you will find."

"The Supreme Court justices are as moral [a] men as you will find."

After thinking about it, I found that you can "cheat", so to speak, by forcing the thing referred to into a singular form. For example:

"They're as great a group of men as you will ever find."

"They're as good a set of options as you could hope for."

"They're as wise a group of decisions you could have made in the circumstances."

I know that this (as far as I know is acceptable), but what I'm really asking is whether you can complete the sentence without using this (hack or kludge), as I see it. In other words can you say:

"They're as great men as you will ever find."

I don't think you can. This has always bugged me.