Film quality 'back in the day' shouldn't really be an issue! Although some makes were preferred to others, I have a colour transparency of my parents taken at their wedding back in about 1941, where the colour is excellent.

The company dad worked for, for over 40 years as Production manager, were Commercial, Industrial & School's photographers, with several branches throughout the UK. He did extensive testing on films used and they settled on Ilford for black and white and Kodak for colour film and colour slides. When automatic machines first came in for colour processing, he would insist on a test strip then manually correct each negative by adjusting the yellow, magenta and cyan, until he got a picture quality he was happy with.

I did my own back to back testing in the mid 1960s and Ilford colour film wasn't a patch on Kodak. A few years later, and early Fuji film was also dreadful. There was a lot of cheap film around in the 1970s in the UK when there was a boom in photolabs offering a 'free' replacement film with your processing. Often the film quality wasn't too clever.

Film colours can also fade, so when scanning, there is often an option to compensate for dust, fading, graining and even backlight. I suspect that many of the pics posted on this site, and others, could be enhanced considerably - but it can extra take time and care of course. Using Photoshop to get rid of scratches or dust spots after scanning can take even longer.