I've driven a transporter, and I thought it was terrible, the seating position is awful, the pedals are way too high, the ride is uncomfortable and almost everything is an optional extra
Well done, you've just described a 'van'.
No I described a new 'Transporter'

That doesn't describe the old transporters, old or new Transits, whatever variant of the Vivaro/Traffic/Primastar, Sprinters, Combo van, corsa van, fiesta van, the Transit Connect, I could go on, all of which are not bad to drive when compared to the newer Transporters, granted with all of these most things would have been an optional extra.
I much prefer the old transporters, the old ones are more reliable too, unlike the newer ones that are made of cheese.
You've not heard all about air-cooled reliability and 'waterleaker' engines in T25s then?

I'm talking about 90's transporters that would run without a problem, even when it was missing a few litres of oil and water, never got a service and was used by a builder so got abused on a daily basis, never missing a beat, unlike the one my sisters old boss has that he uses to carry animal food from the shed to a bit of land he owns a few miles away from where he lives that detonated it's engine being less than 2 years old with less than 30k on the clock.
6 months old and it couldn't do more than 200 miles without developing an engine management fault of some kind that would cut the power then eventually stop the thing running at all.
Probably a DPF fault. Easily resolved.
Then why was it not resolved? it went back to VW time and time again, got nowhere.
Of course, we could base our judgement on T5s on your experience of one - that would be really accurate.
As I know a lot of people who run them as commercial vehicles and campers, I know that in general they are very reliable, capable motors.
Not asking you to base your judgement on my opinion, to be honest I couldn't give a sh!t what you think about them or my opinion, just giving my opinion on them the same as you did, just that it happens that I now know them not to be very good and you know them to be "Epic" did you want me to base my judgement on your opinion? Am I not allowed my own view on them? I used to want a Transporter as a works van rather than the transit I had, that was until I drove one.