@FrizzleFried you are definitely in the minority re: Atari 2600! But you still have a valid viewpoint and stated it well.
I had a similar situation, but opposite reaction. I love the 2600. Because it's all I had as a child. Arcades were inaccessible until I was 9 or 10 and could walk to a convenience store. But with no money, I could only watch even then. So home consoles were the only option. All my friends had a 2600. Enemies too. Cousins. Everybody. But I was probably the last kid to get one. (Except the one who had the Oddessey 2 and the other one who had an Intellivsion.) We
finally got a 2600 sometime in maybe the fall of 1980. We got Asteroids and Space Invaders....the first killer app. YES! FINALLY! Videogames in the house!!!!!!!
When we went to the grocery store each Saturday, I would beg for quarters for the arcade games. I usually wouldn't get anything. Sometimes I would be given one quarter and told to make it last. (yeah....30 seconds and I was done.) But it was a rare treat. I could go and watch other people play while we were there. But I only watched for the most part. There were one or 2 pong consoles in town, and the Mattel handhelds of course. Then 2600s started showing up. By 1979 there were a lot of people who had them. Many of the early games sucked. Especially for 1 player. But the 2 player games were fun. And many of the later games were just plain amazing. We would have tournaments and battle royales (both Atari and outside in the dirt!) and Atari this and Atari that. Some of the games were great. Accurate arcade ports? Not so much. But they were fun and interesting. And they often did things that the arcades didn't. Zig zag bullets in Space Invaders? Invisible shields? Those were cool options. You could play with shields or hyperspace in Asteroids, your choice. Etc. Yeah, sure....they made all those variations to make the games more varied and interesting because they couldn't duplicate the arcade experience. But it worked for us. Especially for those of us who couldn't go to an arcade, or who didn't have money if we did go. The games were fun, they offered a (mostly) positive social experience, and they were pretty darned durable.
We skipped the C64 (no money) and Atari 8-bits (no money) and Colecovision (no money) and xxxxxxx (no money). So we only had a 2600 in the house until I think 1987 when my brother got an NES and I got a Color Computer 2 for Christmas. So we saw some great games come out for 2600 late in its life.
These days I like it mostly
because it's so bare bones. It's a great challenge base for hardware and software development. Because basically nothing is done for you and there are preciously few resources to make use of. It's great for the engineers among us who appreciate elegance and efficiency and are looking for a challenge.