Pre-edit: Rereading, I definitely misread your comment because I saw 37 years ago and my perpetual 2000 brain decided you must be talking about the first year of shinkansen operations, 1964. You're almost certainly correct in your initial assertion that 1986 Shinkansen well outperforms anything on the NEC

Nozomi did not exist in 1964 and the Hikari timetable of 1964 was more or less the same as today's Nozomi (4 stops to Nozomi's 5) across the Tokaido Shinkansen, which is all that existed at the time. At 33 miles per stop, the Acela is in the ballpark of the original Kodoma timetable (27 miles per stop with 12 stops), or today's Hikari timetable (36 miles per stop, which definitely outperforms Acela at an average speed of 128 mph). Definitely not disputing your points on the intangibles or the fact that Acela is not up to snuff when compared to the state of the art, but it does compare favorably to Shinkansen as it opened, which is just to say that we don't even have to start from scratch to realize the benefits that Japan and so many other countries have reaped from their HSR systems, we just have to actually invest in improving and expanding what we have at a competitive level. I think overall we agree, so I'm probably just being pedantic