just to encourage you:- When Kodak selected a type of grey that all meter manufacturers adhere to as a standard, it covers quite a lot of things for exposure and with the lattitude of film i.e. it can take about 5 stops over and about 2 stops under you can't go wrong. It's just the tricky light shots that are the problem which you can pick up easily with a bit of experience......anyway you probably know all this from digi use ...so hope it's not "teaching grandma to suck eggs" 
Your eyesight was probably better in those days, plus the comparatively large focus rings on latter-day manual focus 35mm SLRs were nicely dampened, smooth to operate and easy to use, unlike the comparatively narrow (and often slightly jerky on consumer lenses) focus rings on auto focus SLR lenses, which I think are probably only there to provide the option of occasional fine adjustment, rather than as a secondary means of 'full time' focusing. If I had to focus manually then I know which of the two would be more likely to give me good results.
Modern auto-focus lenses are fly-by-wire which, despite their best intentions, are nowhere near as satisfying to use as a classic manual lens. Unless it happens to be a Russian lens, which my father, a heavy-engineering fitter, described as needing a Stilson wrench to turn.
For Nikon, only the AF-P lenses are fly-by-wire. Most of their other recent lenses are AF-S, which do have a mechanical focus ring. But they still aren't nearly as nice to focus as the properly damped lenses from the manual focus era. And there aren't many AF-S lenses with aperture rings, so most are no good on cameras like the F. Most of the earlier 'screwdriver' AF lenses do have aperture rings and should generally be backwards-compatible.
Nice turn of phrase, though my Helios 44K-4 is as smooth as butter to focus, love it. I have to keep reminding myself it's for exploring fancy bokeh!
