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I remember the old days too, when you could easily tinker with an engine.
Why do you think the companies went to all this stuff? Just to add cost?
I remember back in the early '70s, before cat-converters, trying to meet emmissions. They did. Mainly because the vehicles won't run, and when they did, they stalled a lot. And the family car got 10 or 12 mpg.
Computers are a cheap way to meet emissions and get some power and drivability.
Remember the big news when corvettes and the like got 1 hp per cube? It's pretty easy to pass that these days, even with less octane in the gas.
My '97 astro, V6, has about 50 hp more than my '81 V8 van. The old van had troubles with stumbling to get off idle, some hesitation on the highway, terrible hot starts, and got about 14 mpg if you drove it very nicely. It did meet emission spec.
As much as I like the KISS method (keep it simple stupid), computers do make for a good running, cheap system. If you don't think it's cheap, try to invision a mechanicle system to do do what the computers do several thousand times a second.
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