Having cussed my way through several hours work on a modern OHC engine sitting crosswise in the engine bay of a modern little front-drive s#%*box has reinforced my long-held biases:
First, overhead cams are unnecessary and ridiculous in a street motor. These things go way back, but they seemed to get their marketing buzz in the Fifties when their supposed glories were extolled by gentleman-sportscar-enthusiasts in England with their open-back driving gloves and hired mechanics, and amplified by American writers for sports car magazines, particularly Ken Purdy, who assumed anything new from Jaguar or Mercedes had to be better than any cast iron offering from Detroit. These "experts" laughed at "monkey-motion" push-rods . . . while oblivious to the slapping and jerking and stretching of the mile-long chains, and later belts, that ran their overhead cams.Not incidently, these are the same kinds of folk who are always telling us how we ought to convert to the metric system with it's wonderfully convenient divisions by ten . . . and somehow fail to notice how useful it is to be able to work in fractions as our system so handily allows. But anyway, the subscribers to "Road and Track" and "Car and Driver", happy in their superior tastes over their neighbors driving the big sloppy Detroit barges of the day, lapped up the overhead cams and the swing-axles and mechanical fuel injection, as if they made any practical difference other than to add to service bills at the local dealerships. I say overhead cams are a marketing scam, as are most four-valve heads (but my pals with machine shops love you to buy cars with four-valve heads :rolflmao: ); pushrod engines are simpler, easier and in many cases far easier to work on, and will rev as high as any practical street engine needs to rev.
Second, front-drive cars with crosswise engines were and are NOT an advance in automotive design, dammit!! Especially now! Back in the Sixties and early Seventies, the Mini, the Austin America, the early 2 cylinder Honda coupe, (I owned the latter two), were okay because their engines were dead-simple and ACCESSIBLE, with no emissions crap, air conditioning, or other such impediments to tune-ups and service. But today this configuration is a disaster once it's out of warranty and you want to do anything to it.
I won't argue with you, and I won't change my mind, because these are not opinions but my own cherished prejudices. Everyone needs a few biases, and these are not required to be entirely rational nor to be defended rationally. Here's one more of mine; I detest golf, a stupid activity! I don't trust anyone I don't know who golfs, and have reservations about friends who golf. I can't imagine anyone with more than two digits of IQ being so enamored of golf as to watch it on TV or follow professionals around a course.
But I have to admit, one single thing of great merit has come from golf. The golf tee . . . the best temporary vacuum-hose plug ever
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Meanwhile, for best street six, I stand loyally with the Ford 240/300
Fords Falcon 4.0DOHC engine. Regards power and price, there isn't any better engine for the money in the world. 
