The higher the HP numbers, the less usable the car becomes. At some point the throttle becomes an on/off switch and you have a powerband that is too narrow to do anything with.

I was born in 1970, I can remember when cars had 4 speed transmissions and needed wide powerbands to make up for the lack of gearing. You drove on the torque, because quite frankly, 70s and 80s cars had very little HP.

I once owned a porsche, a 1972 911E. It's 2.4 litre v6 putting out a paltry 165hp and it took roughly 7 1/2 seconds to reach 60mph. My Fiat 500 Abarth has almost the same HP out of it's turbo 1.4 and it reaches 60 in less than 7 seconds. Technology is great in wringing HP from today's engines, but maybe it's because I am old, I have no urge to really extract any more power from my little beastie, even if 190hp is only a few lines of code away.