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@EdwardZ
Not knowing what brakes your bicycle had nor its pads and rims... I'm quite suspicious of claims of "superior" as attributed to modern caliper design. What has vastly improved are the pads and the wear properties of the materials deployed. What has vastly improved are the cables connecting levers to calipers. SRAM Red calipers don't and can't offer superior performance. Their magic is in the SwissStop pads. The rest is about aesthetics, weight and ease of installation.
Why not use old calipers? The biggest problem these days in using old calipers is not in their single pivot but in the leverage of their controllers. That is also why one can't mix SRAM Red with Shimano BR-9000 calipers or Dura Ace STI 2 controllers with Campa Record calipers or etc... Old side pull brakes were generally designed with a hand lever leverage of roughly 4:1. Dual pivots, by contract, generally adopted a 5.6:1 lever. The advantage of the increased mechanical advantage was a feeling of ease against cable friction. While teflon liners were already pretty common cables from the 1990s were a far cry from the super cables we have today. Shimano's new 9000 has reduced the mechanical advantage in the lever and increased it in the calipers. This makes sense.
Gear changing worked fine and well with retrofriction. The big thing that indexed shifting has enabled is the possibility to increase the number of sprockets. Today's 11 speed rears deliver 11 and 12 teeth. If you can spin an 11 Masel Tov. I can't! And if you could I think that Masi would not do well. Unless its a tiny frame, bottom bracket deflection will be extremely counterproductive. If you are not using the 11 or 12.. you can also go with 9 speeds instead of 11 and use more standard 3/32 narrow chains.
So the single speeders must be totally bonkers! Do you need 20+ gears? The peleton rolls along on 11-speeds because that is what they get. Nobody really cares. The issue of neutral support is more important.