I've got one. And a Lee. And a handful of golden era MasterCrafts. And about a thousand bucks worth of other weird old crap I've scraped out of other collections over the years. I LOVE these old pipes. And they are, mostly, terrible pipes!
I got an unsmoked Kaywoodie Connoisseur a couple months ago, probably dates to the 60s, and it had kind of a neat taste on break in, almost resin-y, like it was oil cured (which I don't think they were). Clearly a pipe designed to accomodate people who have no idea how to smoke a pipe, is the thought I'm left with. It's impossible to overdraw with that silly stinger in there.
I'd vastly rather smoke a Castello, generally. These old pipes are fun as hell, but they mostly aren't a benchark for quality in any particular way save one: the vulcanite on a lot of these old stems, or para rubber, is just amazing. But the draw, the drilling, the finishing, the stem work... it's all super mediocre. These were, for the most part, workaday pipe for the workaday man, and that's born out by the number of them we see with 1/2" of cake in them. 1 pipe, all day, every day. Shove in face and let rip.
Algerian briar is simply what the manufacturers had (and mostly because it was cheap). The idea that they were hand selecting THIS wood over THAT wood is nonsense, and that's proven by the fact that most of these old dogs are either filled or rusticated.
I do not prefer spicy pipe.