They were, I test drove one back in the day, it was incredibly slow. They could have been decent, Ford basically did what they did to the T-Bird in a sense except making the model smaller instead of larger.
Corvette did the same kind of thing but in reverse, they started bad and then developed a real sports car.
But this was during the fuel crisis, which was pretty awful, and folks clamored for smaller cars, for a while. They barely got better fuel economy than the larger cars. Putting an underpowered engine in a smaller car just meant folks had to use more of the little power available more of the time.