96-04 is, IMO, the best generation. All the good modern touches, none of the really bad ones, easy as heck to work on without needing a bunch of special tools and literally designed to be rode hard and put away wet.
Interesting side story and a reason why a photographic memory is a giant hassle sometimes: When i bought my first modern mustang it was an 01 GT and the deciding factor was on Ford's website, "We designed the engine in the Mustang for people that tend to abuse their cars." The rest of the context was about how reliable they were. While it's propaganda, the majority of the relevant decisions were to reduce costs and enhance manufacturability with particular attention to allowing a wide variety of engines to be manufactured on the same production line. The improvement of the manufacturability inevitably lead to a more reliable power plant being an emergent property but after a decade of modular motors being put in all kinds of cars and especially into taxis and police cars without torches and pitchforks surrounding Ford corporate offices, that was powerful testimony to the durability.
Well... that and I see pushrod engines as something that the originators of them should have hit themselves in the head with a tack hammer about. Placing the cam in the bottom of the V just so it can be close to the crankshaft and putting the band-aid of pushrods over that particular bullet hole of bad decision making was just retarded. They had a clean sheet of paper and instead of going with something intelligent they just took the valves out of a flathead motor, flipped them upside down and then ran long spindly pushrods up to the actuator arms (rockers) such that a line drawn between the center of pressure on the top and the bottom transects the cross section of the pushrod which induces a bending load on the pushrod. Obviously that was dumb but they did it anyway because we all know how awesomely bad long thin things are at taking bending loads and if you're going to evolve from an especially retarded and poorly thought through engine design to a really great engine design, you might as well stop at the middle waypoint of "mildly retarded" on the way because, reasons.
