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RENNLIST'S Verdad Gallardo's taste in Porsches is arguable!
I note that in today's on-line issue of the RENNLIST communique (specifically, the lead-off opener on 'Porsche's 9 Ugliest Cars'), Verdad Gallardo provides us with evidence of his aesthetic shortsightedness. Among his list of the nine "ugliest" cars Porsche has ever maketed are the 914 and the 924S (as well as the 944). Taste, just as are preferences, is of course a highly contendable aesthetic, subject to a thousand varying gradiations of opinion. What one person thinks is ugly, another may think is a work of exceptional art, and while I recuse myself in this matter due to a vested fondness (an acquired taste, arguably) for the 'original Ugly Duckling' (914), I feel he is WAY off base when it comes to his pronouncements on the 924, the 924S and the 944 cars.
It took me a long, long time to come around to the view that those Porsche cars are actually quite serenely conceived and even appealing, but today I think that were I able to afford a water-cooled P-car, it would have to be a simple, basic 924 in my favorite 'Screaming Yellow Zonker' color. I saw one such specimen a year or so, driven by a sedate grammar school teacher (it was yellow, too!) who parked it in front of a relative's house next to ours, and I ambled over to engage her in a short conversation about it, sharing with her my growing appreciation for the 924 design. She was quite enthusiastic about the car and mentioned her belief that it had a sort of 'sporty elegance' to it that well suited her (both her professional propriety as an icon of the teaching profession and her sense of aesthetics). Interestingly, she remarked that the fact that it was not excessively expensive, or slavishly fawned over by enthusiasts, also pleased her. [I would bet that when she was a kid, watching TV cartoon shows, she was a fan of 'Underdog', too, LoL!]
The 924 series (including 924S and 944 follow-ons) are indeed 'underdogs' (just like my 914-4s), but not because they do not have any intrinsic merits that even subjective individals cannot quickly discern. Thinking back, I recall that while was in high school, a close friend of mine (who came from a German Mennonite family) thought the Karmann Ghia was absolutely the cat's meow! Back then (I was a HS senior), I loved VW bugs but never regarded the Karmann Ghia as particularly 'Sierra Hotel' (note: Air Force slang for "Sh*t Hot!") and actually thought somewhat less of my friend Mike for his (to me) inexplicable love of Ghias.
[Mike also had a peculiar fondness for thick-set Germanic Damen who looked as if they could carry ten, 1-liter bier steins in each hand (mit dem grosse bustenhaltern in die Dirndl, auch, ja!!, but I forgave that slight character flaw, in him since he regularly invited me up to the family's Sierra Nevada cabin in his Karmann Ghia when they were in summer residence there (his father and mother were teachers]. Today, some 50+ years later, I think the Ghia is a rather beautiful design and Mike was decades ahead of his time. Mike served on 'PBRs' (fast river patrol boats) in the 'Brown Water Navy, over in Vietnam, and survived the war but later disappeared mysteriously in Argentina, sadly.
But getting back to the yellow 924 parked next door, I even made a subtle, indirect inquiry as to whether its owner would ever consider selling it me. Naturally, she demurred, saying that she just loved the thing too much to ever consider parting with it. Still, I emerged from that encounter even more fully vested in the 924 appreciation camp.
I am unfamiliar with RENNLIST contributor Verdad Gallardo but will never accept the argument that a car as nicely styled and configured a design as the archetypal 924 could be characterised as "ugly." Better stated, perhaps, as "unpopular" but certainly not a styling exercise that could ever be considered ugly by anyone with half a sense of half-developed artistic and aesthetic appreciation!\
I'll close this with a reference to a HAGGERTY article by Andrew Newton, of 30 Jan 2024. In that piece, Newton's header/subjectline title is "The 914 is no longer Porsche's 'Ugly Duckling'". The article is a long overdue 'exoneration' of the 914's previous blanket disparagement by so-called 'Porsche purists', who seemingly got a charge out of dismissing the 914 as 'not a real Porsche.' It was his title on this piece that got me reflecting, though. People seem to forget that what was, in the Hans Christan Andersen fairy tail of 'The Ugly Duckling', an odd, incongruous duck, soon grew up to become a beautiful black swan. I would counter that the 914 (and the 924-944 series cars) are therefore (ironically) all true 'Ugly Ducklings', since they will eventually be seen (and increasingly so) as swans of a kind, rather than grotesquely out-of-place pariahs in the history of Porsche design evolution. I've personally never understood why 'average' people all want to be unique, different and distinctive, but end up trying desperately to blend in with the herd and express that 'difference' by all trying to be different 'together in exactly the same way.' [See the PSS below, in furtherance of this thought.]
PS: Having taken a close and interested look at the so-called 'improved' 914 designs that were advanced as styling exercises, by designers back in the 70s, I can truthfully state that by my sense of aesthetics, NONE of them looked half as good as the original (final production) 914 design itself. In that context, I've long felt that original designs are most often the purest and best expressions of a concept and that 'follow-ons' are all too often short of the mark and needlessly complicated or "fussified" (QED: The Datsun 240Z and its numerous subsequent updates).
PSS: Speaking of being different, Dr. Rimi Kaminsky, an eminent NY psychiatrist hasrecentl published a fascinating book on what he calls the 'OTROVERT" personality type. There have traditionally been 'INTROVERTS' and 'EXTRAVERTS' in the MSD-5 lexicon but Kaminsky argues that there's actually a third type of personality that he calls the Otrovert, or those individuals who eschew associations with others not because they feel predjucially excluded but because they do so preferentially. Here's what AI has to say about the Otrovert Type: An otrovert, coined by Dr. Rami Kaminski, is a personality type characterized by a sense of "otherness" or "non-belonging," even within social groups. They don't necessarily withdraw from social interaction like introverts, nor do they thrive in large groups like extroverts. Instead, otroverts navigate social situations with a unique perspective, often feeling like an outsider looking in. The book is excellently written, eminently readable and not that long (at only 200 pages): I highly recommend it for all 914, 924, 924S and 944 types, LoL!
Some nom de plumes can be a bit too simplistic to be effectively evocative... 
. Good spot!