Unpopular opinion: I miss tuning carbs by ear instead of plugging in a laptop
Back in the 90s at my dad's shop in Bakersfield, we'd set the idle mix on a Holley 4150 by ear and a vacuum gauge, and it took maybe 10 minutes. Now a misfire code sends me to the scanner and live data, and half the time it's a coil pack or a vacuum leak I could've sniffed out with a propane torch. Anybody else feel like OBD2 made us faster but dumber, or is it just me?
Ah yes, the good old days when you could fix a car with a screwdriver and half a brain instead of a thousand dollar scanner that just tells you "misfire on cylinder 3" like that's somehow news. Now we all stand around staring at live data like it's gonna confess to us, when half the time a squirt of carb cleaner would've found the leak in five seconds. So yeah, OBD2 made us quicker but it definitely traded away some of the old school know-how.