I may be a bit weird (now wouldn't THAT be a revelation!!) but I have never been enthused with the boxy look of the 914.
I've driven them. They're nice. The more/harder you flog them the better they feel on the road but I've seldom found any owner/drivers who flogged their 914 on the street.
I've also driven one with the Chevy V8 conversion and it felt like a barge (lots of understeer), plus the way the cooling was designed/implemented, the radiator discharged out onto the hood before the windshield so the heat went up over the windshield and swooped right down into the cockpit. On a warm summer day it was un-driveable. None of that was Porsche's fault, however.
But beyond all that, the design is just uninspiring for me. A Fiat X19 was more interesting than a 914 (and probably could at least keep up, if you kept the revs up) and a 914 parked next to a Fiat 124 Spyder would never get any visitors at a cars and coffee, believe me.
That said and getting back to the red car conversion way up at the top of this thread, that red car looks like one of those customs that Tom McBurnie turned out for the TV studios years ago, like the "Miami Vice" cars. Everyone has been picking out nits, when the overall design and implementation shows a lot of thought and craftsmanship and that should be celebrated, not condemned. It's almost like a Camarro designer went off to the side and thought "I wonder what Pininfarina would do with this?" and sketched up the red car. Nothing wrong with that - shows imagination, don'cha think?
There are a bunch of cool little "sports cars" out there, right now, both old and new designs. Everything fits into the spectrum, somewhere......