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I live in a PAL country and have grown up with the Never Twice Same Colour stories. Well engineered NTSC is very good indeed. The problem is that making it work well with the valve (tube) technology of the 1950s was a bit too hard. I have personal experience of early solid state PAL encoders. Many drifted horribly.
There is a story, I don't know how true, that the Soviet bloc adopted SECAM for technical reasons. Politically the French "sold" it to them but technically it was a good fit for their huge transmission systems. It's also said that their VTRs "Quad-ski", a Russian copy of the Ampex machines, didn't have the "Colortec" fine timing correction that was needed to replay PAL or NTSC. SECAM just needs monochrome timing accuracy.
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