I'm aware of the amount of time/mileage being put on di/turbo engines. Some are making it to high mileage, I'll give you that, but when they give trouble the cost is enough to make the customer jump ship for a new car. Some things get to a certain point of advancement where that's as good as they're going to get. By the beginning of this century we had made it. Port fuel injected engines with natural aspiration and distributorless ignition proved themselves to be long lived, relatively easy to work on, inexpensive to repair, and made more than enough power for the average consumer. Plus, fuel economy was basically the same as it is now.
Guys, I'm not hard to please. The Impala in my sig is about as basic of a car as you could get in 2005. By the time it rolled out of the factory, every bit of it's technology had been in use for twenty years in one form of another. It has port fuel injection and pushrods. It might make 170 hp but that's probably being quite liberal an estimate. I haven't driven or worked on anything newer with di/turbo/ohc and thought, "this is better". If anything, the honest truth is my thought was, "this thing shifts like it's retarded, it idles like it has a misfire, the power comes on at the most useless part of the Rev range, and overall they've managed to build a vehicle that does everything my 14 yr old car can do, but somehow worse." I'd love to see gm and Ford dump their ohc/di/turbo v6 engines for pi/na/pushrod engines like they were using 10-15 years ago. Sure, the Vulcan 3.0, 31/34/35/3900 v6s weren't powerhouses, but they worked and we're cheap to maintain. That's really all they average consumer needs. Sorry for the derailment, I'm just stating my opinion. Give me simple, reliable, and easy to work on over "advanced" any day.