I'm old enough to ride with downtube shifters too, have for close to 20 years, do so roughly every day including for the past several years in a hilly city where I shift a lot, and I could not stand the brief stint (~year) I did with slow, unwieldy brake-lever shifters. I had to adjust those way more often and more precisely than I adjust my friction shifters, too.
I was never sold on those shifters either. Mechanically indexed shifting in general never really was fantastic enough to justify all the additional finicky fine-tuning required for it to work well. But electric shifting is a whole separate ballpark; it's self-adjusting, prevents cross-chaining, etc. It's set and forget except charging it every few weeks.
It's like the difference between carburetors and modern fuel injection. Some people like to spend all their time playing with jets; I'd rather be driving the car.
