I think that rev hang makes the car easier to drive for the average commuter. I've been driving modern cars for so long now I'd forgotten what it was like before.

I recently put my EK4 on the road and it has a good, old school cable throttle, and revs almost instantaneously return to idle when you lift off. It takes me a couple of gear changes to get used to it (in fact, the faster you shift, the smoother it is to drive - within reason of course). My L-plate son, on the other hand struggles with the immediate drop in revs, and it takes him much longer to get the hang of driving the Civic. Once he hops back into the Focus, he's immediately smoother on the controls. He's still at the stage where he takes his time shifting gears, and generally does everything fairly slowly when he's driving. This works with modern DBW systems, but isn't so smooth on old school un-assisted everything cars.