Most of the SNES-era games are still great, IMHO. It really depends on the game as to whether or not it ages well. Even classics like PacMan is still just as fun as ever. Some early RPGs? Not so much. Yeah, I still love the original Final Fantasy, but the original Dragon Warrior has a horrific grind, but so do later games like 7th Saga (a SNES game). The only thing that fixes the grind in FF1 are those two tiles where you can meet giants early and if I didn't know about them, I'd have probably given up on the game by now, because of the steep grind when you hit Elfland.

That makes me believe that our tolerance for clunky UIs changes over time. For example, if I can't automatically keep my items sorted and organized without flipping things around one-by-one, I get frustrated. It's one of the few bad parts of EarthBound (a game I really loved for the creative writing... seriously, even the back of a billboard is likely to contain a joke).

In that respect, Ultima has one of the worst UIs because it was so complex and people hadn't figured out how to simplify it yet. In that respect, later Ultimas seem worse to me, because each one is more complex than the last. I can still have a bit of fun with Ultima 1 on the NES. More than I have with the later ones, anyhow. I wonder if the guy who invented automatic note taking in games was playing Ultima at the time... it would make a lot of sense.