VHS didn't always look noisy and distorted, but it always looked blurry and had horrible color bleeding. I disliked it even though it was the "only" technology at the time and we didn't have it at home.

Nope, color bleeding was virtually non-issue with SECAM color encoding. I've grown up in a SECAM country, but we had a lot of PAL content. PAL always looked bad and smudgy in comparison. NTSC was just plain awful and intolerable even by my pre-teen standards.

Are you sure that PAL reception/tapes and possibly "yeah we also do that" PAL implementations were good in your region? I'm from a PAL region and broadcast PAL looked just fine to me. Only VHS PAL looked blurry. VHS's very low horizontal color resolution was a VHS limitation, AFAIK not much to do with how color phase errors were averaged out across lines in PAL vs SECAM.