Back to reality for a moment, I thought the Genesis was ass when I was younger. I did own one for a short time, but traded it in. I had a 1st gen unit, and the picture was grainy and washed out. The audio was OK, but some of the sports games I played had barely intelligible voice samples that sounded cheap.
It just goes to show what a shitty video encoder can do to a first impression. These days I'm a fan of the Genesis/Megadrive, now that I've seen it on better equipment. The SNES and the TG16 on the other hand had a far superior video encoder, so I thought they looked amazing back then. They were just so much brighter and clearer than the Genesis (not taking the colors into consideration, because I couldn't tell on my TV at the time).