The "love at first sight" moment for me was when I climbed into the driver's seat of my first Honda Odyssey. I was immediately smitten with the feeling of "everything is here, just where it should be" (in spite of the fact that the right edges of the sound and temperature controls were slightly more of a reach than I would have wanted) because the configuration and spacing for all the controls was appropriate and comfortable.
ps - I grew up in the 1950s-1960s when dashboards were metal and bristled with all manner of pokers and stabbers, and seat belts (including shoulder belts) were not mandatory in the US until 1968 - although most cars had front seat lap belts by the early 1960s
I've come to appreciate normal cars a lot more in the recent past. I particularly have grown to like cars that age well. Cloth seats and simple design, hard plastics that don't age, scratch easily, or creak.
For me, the car that scratched the itch for a "fun but simple" project was a first gen Miata. It's a very overplayed answer in the car world, not powerful at all and the styling is... divisive, but man are they fun to drive and work on. If you keep them mostly stock and can find one without much rust, they're cheap thrills.
You can do most of their engine maintenance with basic hand tools. Mazda is still producing parts for them OEM despite it being a 33 year old platform. The aftermarket and forum support for them is huge. They're as basic as any car made in the last 40 years could ever come: most of the interior parts are hard wearing cloth and plastic, the vast majority have a manual transmission, and the most technologically advanced thing in them is the radio (and they were built so simply that the base models didn't even get one of those.)
