What is a "good" assembly language? The best I've ever seen was the VAX instruction set. The second best, probably m68k. These were big, CISC CPUs that were as nice as possible to program in assembly language.

The 6502 wasn't. Everything about the 6502 was "do more with less" and you had to be really clever to eke out performance on it. But that's a good thing! A clean, big CISC architecture like the former ones is also a good compiler target. The 6502 was deeply weird, but programming it in assembly was necessary to get it to fly. That's an era. If you want to relive that era, then go for it. It's much more quirkily fun that, say, the 8080 (the Z80 is another beast, though backwards compatible) and much more mainstream than the otherwise better 6809, all of which are also from the "assembly language required for performance" era.