I just ordered 4 NOS blank VHS tapes

"It may be rose coloured memory but you know, we watched VHS movies and i don't remember thinking, this looks like shit."

It looked fine to me back then, but I didn't have anything better to compare it to. An NTSC TV broadcast is better on paper (330 TVL), but we never got perfect reception on any channel. Channel 5 was the closest to being perfect reception, but even it had minor ghosting going on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosting_(television)). VHS looked very similar to channel 5, minus the ghosting.

We got cable TV in 1989, which solved the reception issues, but it wasn't the strongest signal ever. With analog cable TV there's a lot of signal loss between the cable company and your TV. It looked similar to channel 5's OTA reception at our house. It was a little noisier but it didn't have any ghosting.

These days I can use much higher quality signals (such as a DVD- or BD-over-composite) with the same old CRT TVs to see that they are capable of displaying much higher quality than what I ever saw on them in the '80s and '90s. And that VHS copy of The Terminator I made could almost pass for DVD- or BD-over-composite, if not for the tape artifacts that I mentioned. It looks way better than any other VHS tape I've ever seen.

We were also watching on the old tube tvs and it was all we had so we accepted it. I recall in the late 2000’s this guy I knew was watching a DVD on an old tube tv and he was complaining as he didn’t see what the big deal was all about.

I have lots of them. My main TV is a 32" CRT that I bought new in 2005 (I made a point of buying a new one at that time because I knew they wouldn't be manufacturing CRTs for much longer), and in my bedroom I have a 19" CRT TV that I've also had since it was new (Christmas of 1988). I had to fix that one last fall because it was blowing one of its fuses immediately every time it was turned on.

Yeah, metal tapes were the best as long as you had a cassette deck that could record them properly (most of them couldn't; the ones that could were high-end).

When I was a kid I knew nothing about tape formulations and I thought that metal tapes were intended for heavy metal music. I never bought any because they were expensive, and it's a good thing I didn't. I would have been disappointed because no tape deck I ever owned or had access to could have recorded them properly. Any tape deck can put sound on them, but it will only sound good if the deck is designed to handle them.

As a side note, those special formulations like chrome and metal were only developed because compact cassette tapes needed all the help they could get. They weren't originally designed as music media; they were designed for voice dictation and were originally mono-only. They have a very slow tape speed (1-7/8 IPS) which results in low bandwidth which results in a poor signal-to-noise ratio. Things like the various flavors of Dolby noise reduction and better tape formulations helped to make up for the slow tape speed.

Studio reel-to-reel tape recorders (and some consumer models) on the other hand used standard ferric oxide (type 1) tape, because those cruised along at 15 IPS and didn't need any help.

I remember Akai as a very good brand, but disappearing from stores sometime in the late 1980s - early 1990s. Same with Sansui.

Some Akai VCRs were rebadged JVCs. For example, the Akai VS10 was a rebadged JVC HR-7700 (the HR-7700 was also rebadged as the Ferguson 3V23 for the UK market).

JVC invented VHS and came up with the main innovations/improvements over the years (Hi-Fi Stereo for sound quality and HQ for picture quality). Other manufacturers of VHS machines licensed the technology from JVC, which also allowed them to legally use the VHS, HQ, and Hi-Fi Stereo logos on their machines.

One VCR innovation that Akai definitely came up with was the onscreen display/programming, which everyone eventually copied.

My JVC VCR was the first model to have HQ circuitry (well, JVC released two models with HQ at the same time; the $850 HR-D565U and the $900 HR-D566U, which is the one I have). Here's a short Popular Mechanics article about it from December 1985:

https://i.imgur.com/j63De8e.png

Any VCR that has the full implementation of HQ (some cheaper ones only have a partial implementation of HQ, yet they still use the HQ logo) and is otherwise properly built to specifications is going to be as good as it gets for VHS picture quality. Mine can make recordings that are nearly indistinguishable from a DVD that's playing over the same composite video connection and TV, so I don't see much room for improvement.

"Do you still watch a lot of VHS?"

No, hardly ever.

"also do you have a digitital converter box for your crt TV's so you can watch broadcast tv?"

Yes, but I don't watch much broadcast TV either. The last time I watched a TV broadcast was a couple of months ago. I mostly use my CRT TVs to watch my favorite TV shows (all of which are decades old and 4:3 aspect ratio) on DVD (I don't watch them directly from my DVDs, but rather, I rip the DVDs to a USB flash drive and watch them from that through either my BD player or my WD TV media player), and for classic video game consoles (mostly Atari 2600, NES, and SNES).