I was 15 in 1991 and my first bicycle with gears had a pair of SunTour X-Press. I can understand riders with more experience wouldn't appreciate how easy it was just punching on levers to shift, but it was of great help to me.

BTW, mine did also break, but that depended mainly on if you had the inferior SL-XM10 model with the whole downshifting lever made of plastica and riveted to the indexing mechanism, or the superior, more robust SL-XP10 with a hardened steel lever with a plastic cover. The latter would just scoff at any impact.