I'm a fan of OBD-1 era vehicles.
I'm not comfortable with carburetors, but maybe if I had one I'd get used to it. Older carbed setups might be simpler, but I think the later carbed setups got pretty complicated with all the emissions controls they had to keep up with, increasing the number of little mechanical widgets.
I prefer early EFI systems, but only up until the start of OBD-2 (which IMO is when things got unduly complicated).
I think throttle body injection is probably the simplest and most reliable setup you could ever have, but it's less efficient and more difficult to pass emissions, so in that sense MPFI is preferable.
Iron cylinder heads. Aluminum heads make more horsepower but they are fragile. In an overheat, aluminum heads are just about guaranteed to warp or crack. Iron is much more durable, not invincible, but durable.
Aluminum heads on an iron block are also more prone to blowing gaskets due to differences in thermal expansion of the 2 surfaces. Some engines are more prone to it than others, but it's a repeated strain on the gasket every time you thermal cycle it.
Personally I don't think aluminum engines belong in most vehicles other than sports cars. Iron makes more sense from a practicality standpoint, but horsepower sells, and CAFE is a factor as well.
Early EFI cars are computer controlled, but the computer controls are quite simple compared to the OBD-2 era. As such, they are easier to understand and to diagnose, and there's a lot less to go wrong in the first place.
My GM from 1986 is easy to keep running. A close relative has a GM from 1997, and it's become a nightmare. It has over 200K miles, which is a full life I suppose, but I wish I could understand that car and help fix it to run properly.
We spent nearly a year (and a lot of money) fighting with an intermittent ignition problem on that car. I had an ignition fault on my 1986 2.8L and fixed it in 30 minutes. The ignition system on a late 90s 3800 is way more complicated than it needs to be and there is no shortage of people struggling with them.
My 86 is driven daily, it's more reliable than many cars half it's age. I had to replace some parts here and there, mostly in the first couple years I had the car, but it's not difficult or expensive. Parts are easy to get. GM made millions of transverse 2.8L V6 cars, and they use mostly the same parts. There's the occasional unique part that's more expensive, but by expensive I mean "still costs less than it would on a new car".
Every area and subsystem of an OBD-1 car is dramatically simpler than the same system on a newer car. Before long you can become an expert on your vehicle and fix it with ease. I value the self reliance that comes from that.
On OBD-2 era vehicles, there's so much interconnected junk in those cars that working on them can make you want to gouge your eyes out, and it seems like there's always something else going wrong. Some are worse than others, of course, but they're all overly complicated.
Most OBD-1 era vehicles are thoroughly documented nowadays. Often you can get a factory service manual for little money. Every little quirk has been discovered, and other owners have come up with good rework procedures that have been posted online.
In many cases, the ECM programming has also been reverse engineered. With the relative simplicity of old ECMs, it was bound to happen.
Using freely available software, you can plug a laptop into it and watch the sensors as the car runs. Using other freely available software, you can tweak a custom chip if you're so inclined. This was useful to me when I found that my injectors weren't original to the car, and it needed some tweaking to fix an idle problem. It has also allowed changing the behavior of the TCC lockup to personal preference.
To retune a modern car would require expensive equipment and software, likely built on proprietary information that isn't openly available or discussed.
I guess I'll stop rambling. Point is, I personally believe OBD-1 to be the sweet spot era of cars that are still of practical size and economy but can also be kept running long after their expiration date without extraordinary difficulty or expense - unless rust is a problem in your area. Rust sadly makes it impossible to keep old cars sometimes.
