I think there is always a very large amount of rose tinted glasses when thinking about past cameras, this is because you remember what you thought about that camera when you were judging it by the standards of the time, rather than standards of now.
For example, I remember thinking my D700 was simply magic in terms of shadow recovery, highlight recovery and high ISO noise.
When I switched to m43 I compared a load of old raw files to comparable images shot on m43 and the differences in the above factors aren't very much (and in a few ways the m43 files are better). The images from the D700 do look gorgeous though, it was the last Nikon before they changed their colour profiles.