New vs. old

"Maybe everything looked awesome back in the day and we've just been fed a lie that newer is better."

Newer home video formats have drastically higher resolution than VHS, but for the type of TVs that most people had during VHS's heyday, DVD is as good as it gets because it has more than enough resolution to max out the picture quality potential of an SD CRT TV. So to record a VHS tape that looks almost the same as a DVD on an SD CRT TV over composite or RF is incredible.

Two of my VCRs are hooked up, refurbished by me (new capacitors in the power supplies, head cleaning, and lubrication of the gears), and ready to go: A JVC HR-D566U (made in 1985) in my living room connected to a 32" CRT TV and a General Electric VG-7720 (manufactured by Panasonic in 1988) connected to a 19" CRT TV in my bedroom.

I'm most nostalgic about the setup in my bedroom because I've had both the VCR and the TV since they were new in 1988 (we got them both for Christmas 1988 when I was almost 14), so I especially like using that setup; I like the sounds that that particular VCR makes, I like the specific look of its picture when displayed on that particular TV that it's always been paired with, and I like using its huge remote control that I have muscle memory for dating back to when I was a kid.

Another thing I like about VCRs as opposed to DVD/BD players or digital file players is the 100% consistent and predictable fast-forward and rewind search functions. It always works the same no matter what tape you're playing, whereas with digital players, it usually goes by key frames in the digital files, and the spacing of key frames can and does vary drastically from file to file. So you can have cases where you pressed rewind for just a split second and you've gone back a couple/few minutes in the video when you only wanted to go back, say, 10 seconds.

"Have you tried recording a Bluray onto a VHS?"

Indirectly. When I first got my JVC VCR several years ago I recorded the Blu-ray version of The Terminator to VHS on it as a test (and it looked incredible for VHS, much better than the official Thorn EMI VHS release of The Terminator), but before I did that I ripped the Blu-ray and cropped the video down to 4:3 in order to make use all of the limited resolution of VHS, rather than wasting a good deal of it on black bars (letterboxing).

4:3 content is ideal for VHS and that's a problem when it comes to BD. Even if you have a movie or TV show on BD that's natively 4:3; on the BD it will be 4:3 picture content embedded in a 16:9 frame, resulting in black borders on each side (pillarboxing). You can't record that directly to VHS unless you want a little picture in the middle of the screen completely surrounded by a thick black border (windowboxing).

If you don't mind somewhat minor letterboxing then recording 1.85:1 movies on BD directly to VHS would be fine. There were even a few official VHS releases with letterboxed 1.85:1 movies, Innerspace (1987) for example. But if you do it with a 2.35:1 movie you'll get major letterboxing, which isn't good when you don't have much resolution to begin with on VHS.

For 4:3 movies and TV shows, using a DVD as the source is perfect, because, unlike with BDs, 4:3 content on a DVD has no pillarboxing, so you can record it directly to a VHS tape with no issues (like I did with Revenge of the Ninja and Young Guns; which are the only two 4:3 movies I have on DVD).

I also have the Ninja Trilogy BD box set (which includes Revenge of the Ninja), which is great for watching on my HD projector, but because it's 1.85:1 (which is its theatrical aspect ratio), it's not so good for recording to VHS.