Back in the day, the quest to come up with the perfect personal airplane may have seamed easy at first. It only needed to perfectly combine ease and cost of operation, ability to carry the right number of passengers and operate from most all airports in the country.
During the post-World War II boom, the major airplane manufacturers to include Aeronca, Luscombe, ERCO, Piper and Cessna, among others, all eventually came to the conclusion that the future for mass-marketing airplanes was wrapped up in something that had four seats and on the order of 150 HP. ERCO (the Ercoupe folks) never made it past a prototype. Aeronca and Luscombe gave up after limited success, while Cessna and Piper went on to fight it out for decades, while Beech and Grumman-American tried to make inroads.