It might have been simpler to ask what makes a bad centre-pin.
Or, to avoid unnecessary offence, what has put you off a 'pin that other people rave about?
F'rinstance, I have a Match Aerial. Bought, lightly used, around 1970 and still not properly run in, 'cos I'm just not good enough. I watched in awe as Billy Lane demonstrated centre-pin casts with one of these, at a show in the mid sixties, and he could make it do all but sing.
It reduces me to a sobbing wreck, unless I've packed a Rapidex, Trudex, or Speedia as back-up. The arbour is too shallow for me; the line spills off the side of the spool if the faintest breeze discovers an inch of slack line that I have negligently allowed to form.
The other three quietly and efficiently file it under "Line" and stow it away as hoped.
But even they are not without their vices: The check lever on the Speedia is sharp enough to cut the line if you bully a chub while having failed to notice that a really unforgivable loop has gotten round it (and that was a float I made decades back and really loved, macrame-d forever into a reed-bed); the Rapidex was made for speed-demon matchmen fishing ten-yard swims, and the drum is a bit narrow (made tolerable by that new-fangled nylon) and the cage inhibits Wallis-casting; the only real criticism I've heard of the Trudex is that the lugs for attaching the line-guard are a mite ugly. True, but it's a fishing reel, not a posing pouch.
Better reels are available, but not at the sort of prices I can run to!
I bought one of those "Black Zero" bearings jobs for £7.50 in a sale; the only fault I can find is the lack of a compensating drag, an omission it shares with the later model Hardy Conquest, and means you have to be as vigilant against overruns when trying to relax by a pond as while trotting till your eyes bleed on a river.
My petrol-splitter has a Young's Heritage which looks dam' near perfect to me - wider drum, turned arbour, micro-drag... as does the Purist, which also has an unpierced back, which must help keep the muck out. At the prices asked, though, I doubt if I'll ever find out, and don't really mind; it'll be a lotta dosh for a tiny advantage.