I remember being foolish enough to say that once Pete & I was roundly pilloried for saying it
You are of course, absolutely correct, all cars were horribly scruffy back in the 1960's even those few that were very well prepared by the likes of BVRT, Arden etc. Were usually pretty crap by today's standards. Look at Radford, when they did their "Top Quality" resprays for their cars which they would charge the equivalent of one & a half E Type Jags for, they just masked round such things as the headlights & indicators, they never even thought of painting the inside the same colour as the outside.
My mate Rich's Err Cooper S is far closer to what these sort of cars looked like in period.
The whole "Cafe Racer" look, a term which I despise was invented by a hand full of people back in the early 1990's, the most notable of which was the quite rightly much maligned Greg Hales. V997 was a car that many people lusted after when it appeared in Mini World & it's appearance created many, many clones.
Yes, the standards of work has progressed, which is undoubtedly a good thing, but there are very few cars that actually represent how cars were back in the day & when they do appear, they are usually dismissed as tatty & horribly tasteless.