Now, no contest. Nostalgia is the enemy of SOTA. It's one reason I state that the greatest impediment to advancing an audio system is the audiophile.
Streaming audio alone, having the world literally at fingertips, makes this the greatest time for audiophiles. The quality of the average budget system is light years above other decades. Older components and speakers were horrible all in all. The most I can take listening to a vintage system is a few hours - at most. They're awful in comparison to today's quality, in every parameter of sound quality. They are poorly defined, have too much noise and excessive coloration, are often frequency limited, and often have outright high distortion. The only person to whom I would recommend vintage gear, or the associated experience, is someone who has no serious budget for audio. It's better than nothing.
You can take all the sound of those decades and throw them into the trash bin, now that superior class D has arrived. They couldn't begin to touch this sound quality even 15-20 years ago. It would have taken a fortune to even try.
The prevalence of the huge, hollow, boxy speaker was nearly a scourge on the population. No variety, no choice, no deviation from yuck results. Not universally, but nearly.
Cables were complete crap. The cabling alone was disgusting, and audio systems were made fundamentally worse due to the ignorance of the talking heads who never could figure out how important they were. Then came the years of ignorance, still in effect, where mixing cables is supposed to be genius. Not!
There were, and still are, so many system building mistakes in the community and industry, like endlessly promoting "giant killers" and components made with garbage parts, that it's a wonder we have gotten this far. :)
Now, I'm not out to kill good feelings. But, I am all about superior sound and superior listening experiences, not only warm fuzzies.