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I liked the transmission in my Triumph TR6. The BRZ is a close second. The reason I liked the TR6 is because in addition to the tactile feedback you got through the shifter knob, the Triumph made great sounds. You could hear the synchronizers spinning up. Shit was happening under there. Today people would probably whine about that and take the car back to the dealership thinking something was wrong with it.
The transmission in my dad's MGB was also very good (and just as noisy), but the throws were shorter. The pattern in my mom's MG Midget was so tight that I never really got comfortable with it.
As for transmissions that were "meh," I had a Mazda B2000 and a Chevy S10, both of which were just sort of there. They were so bland that I had forgotten the S10 was a manual until I started thinking about manual transmissions in the other thread.
The "worst" is sort of relative, because I wouldn't exactly call it a bad experience. When I was a teenager my dad bought a 1959 Chevy Apache pickup for $700. It had a "three on a tree," which is a three speed transmission with the shifter on the steering column.
If I remember correctly, reverse was up and toward you, first gear was down and toward you, second was up and away, and third was down and away. You used your whole arm to shift. There was no pattern printed on the shifter knob like what most of us are used to. That would be pointless, because the shifter knob pointed variously at the roof and the passenger door.
The clutch in that beast didn't swing toward the firewall the way modern cars do. You had to pick your whole leg up and shove the clutch straight down through the floor. It had something like a foot of travel. It was so highly levered that you couldn't really feel the engagement point. You just knew it was making contact when the truck started moving.
Another neat thing about it was that it had a floor starter, which was a little round pedal that closed the connection on the starter instead of using the ignition switch to crank it. You turned the key in the dash to turn on the ignition, then closed the contacts on the starter with your right foot on the starter pedal. The key wouldn't actually stay in the ignition switch and would fall out on the floor while you were driving.
The truck had some problems. Second gear was bad. It would BANG out of gear and kick that shifter down with enough force to break your fingers if your hand were in the wrong place. Every now and then you'd get stuck in neutral with the shifter flopping around disconnected, and you'd have to pull to the side of the road, take the shifter linkage apart and put it back together. Then you'd drive on your way with greasy hands.
I'm hesitant to characterize it as a bad driving experience, though, because that thing was fun once you accepted you weren't driving a performance vehicle. It also helped me years later when my key grip on a low budget movie shoot looked at me and said he couldn't drive the elderly 20 ton box truck full of lighting gear we were picking up from the equipment rental house. It turned out that on a set full of New Yorkers, most of whom could barely drive at all, I was the only person on the shoot who could actually drive that truck every time we moved to a new location. Even though it had a floor shifter, it felt just like driving that old Chevy.
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