If you shoot RAW, the picture control is immaterial. It can be modified in post.

Ask yourself instead: why are you shooting both RAW and JPEG?

Other camera settings that are immaterial to the RAW shooter: White Balance and Color Space. Consider just using the camera's Standard picture style, Auto-WB and sRGB colorspace. Your JPEGs will be good enough, if you continue to capture these too, and your RAW has a 'good before' reference for your editing. Your editor determines the colorspace as the RAW file is colorspace independent.

I'm sure that rmalarz will reply for himself, but I will answer your question from my perspective.

I used a D200 for years. When I bought it, it was probably the best Nikon DSLR available other than the true pro models, and, in any case, it was the best that I could afford. I was very happy with it and used it for years, even after other, improved models were introduced. But for a good period of time, it retained its position in life. It served me well while I was doing photography pretty much in isolation. It captured the images that I was after. As I tried more things, though, and couldn't make some of them really work, the question arose about whether there might be something new that would do better. So I started shopping around a little. I was retired by that time, so it didn't seem to make sense to spend a ton of money. The result was trading a big box of old film equipment locally for a well-used D300 and nice D300s. Guess what...these cameras, although still not the latest, offered me quite a bit of new capability over the D200. Technology had advanced to the point that I could accomplish some things that weren't easily possible for me before. This further widened my range of interest so that over a few years I made some other equipment advances to gain some important (at least to me) additional capability.

So the short answer to your question (from my perspective) is that the best that used to be available was a far cry from the best that is now available. That's why today's preferences often don't include cameras that were used in the past. Besides that, most of them are lost, broken, or worn out. And there are some folks who do still like to use some of the ones that are left. Some of those folks do beautiful work with them. But I'll bet that if what is available today were available then, it would absolutely have been used by at least some of the photographers of the time.

I wholly agree. The equipment does matter, to a point. Stick a roll of 120 in a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye and a roll in a Hasselblad and you'll see quite a difference in the quality of the image. That is unless one is going for the style of photograph produced by the Kodak camera. So, people who state it's the photographer and not the camera are simply parroting some cliche they've heard somewhere. One with which I've never agreed.

Although I've not seen this edition of Tony's videos, it's probably the only one with which I've agreed.
--Bob