VA pilot, the Aussie motor vehicle equivalent that I often used to describe the B732 was the HQ Holden of the skies. Simple, reliable and go-anywhere. Could not kill it with a stick and you needed to be able to drive a manual gear shift properly to get anything out of it.
Later B737 versions like the 300/400 made far more sense to the beancounters, because suddenly there was serious payload/range capability whereas the 200 in its various iterations still suffered from takeoff performance and fuel burn. But the later ones were not such 'pilot's airplanes' due to the huge leap forward in automation. Suddenly this became so smooth that it was almost seductive and everyone obsessed with mastering it to the detriment of basic skills. I have seen a few very experienced B737 pilots who had only flown the later series really struggle with the basic 200 which had no auto-throttle, nothing but pitch mode for climb and descent and some even had no automatic altitude capture and not much in the way of navigation coupling.