I personally believe that much of the reason for the '84 having a bad reputation, maybe more accurately, the X-Fire having a bad reputation was technician ignorance.
To understand that, you have to think of the average mechanic in 1984. The vast majority of them were carburetor guys. Many of them barely had enough electrical knowledge to understand a point ignition system much less an ECM. So, along comes this new fangled electronic fuel injection. The X-Fire was not the only injection or computerized systems that the average tech was struggling with, but the X-Fire did have some short comings from the factory. So you add the tech ignorance of EFI in general to some quirky problems that he had to solve on the X-Fire and this added up to complaints.
The customers complaints were aggravated by the fact that many techs couldn't do much with them at the time. Since then, more information has come out and these systems can be made to work well, but in the wake of all that they got a bad reputation.
The very same thing happened to the 4+3. There are a few electrical circuits and computer involvement so the average tech of the time was baffled by it. In actuality the circuits are ridiculously simple, but most techs are parts changers. The real techs can figure out the problems which are usually very minor like a wire or a switch. But, due to technician ignorance it will have a bad reputation forever.
So, it's not always Detroit that is guilty of developing a vehicle subsystem that develops a bad reputation, it's the service departments that should bear much of the guilt.
BTW, as far as I'm concerned, GM suspension engineers get very little credit for the high skid pad numbers on the C4. Goodyear developed the tires. At that time the car had WAAaaay more rubber touching the road than anything else you could buy. Who gets credit doesn't really matter because what you ended up with was the first American car cornering on rails.
Have a great day,
4LT GS Roadster
