I certainly noticed that it was ineffective in discussing implications with the students. I found Boyle's observations far more effective in teaching science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri...
The goal was not to learn how to do physics calculations, but to understand each writer's concept of reality and humanity's relationship to it. I remember that Blake really focused on the worth of actually instantiated reality, what he called "minute particulars", in contrast to Newton's abstractions:
He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars
And not in generalizing Demonstrations of the Rational Power.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355?shelf=chronol...
Recently I've been following long with the Distance Ladder challenge I saw on 3 blue 1 brown with Terence Tao. Going through those question is motivating because those questions are based in solving navigational problems. I fear that with the ever increasing the low friction in life we are stealing the challenge and things for people to consider to build up there problem solving ability before the curtain is pulled.
I think its also more motivating to learn considering more interesting questions especially in math. All this to say going back to the source material while not the most modern accurate physics it usually does include large amounts of motivation to explain why things are logical and what they are doing it for. To be fair I haven't read the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia but I have read other old book and wager it has similarities
Even for modern theories like general relativity people study by textbooks written many decades after the fact, with a clear picture after things were settled, and not by Einstein's first papers :)
Logarithms were used percisely because they made long tedious multplication and division into simple additiona and subtraction. That's really valuable if you don't have calculators but when we don't talk about this it makes things feel arbitray. There properties don't stop being useful after we have calculators either but the motivation in my academic career was basically ignored until college (sample size of 1 :( ) but I think its something that I hear from many many people.
It'd be like wanting to improve your cardio health so you try to climb K2. The edition I have has 150+ pages of just introduction. You have to wade through all of that just to be able to figure out how to read the rest of the tome. It is cool, though!