Glad you found your solution. There is a lot of benefit to learning how to focus manually and truly isn't that difficult. You could practice on digital if you didn't want to spend much on developing film.
While I never used Canon SLRs, I had a Nikon N90s which came out in 1994, but its cheap and its about as modern as you can get. You don't have to worry about incorrectly loading the film as its super easy, the camera mostly takes care of it for you. You metering is spot on, takes the guesswork out of it. Super fast auto focus too. So I 100 percent get it and some of my best photos on film I took was from the N90s, however personally when I was using it, I felt like I was shooting digital which is not what I wanted because I wanted film to slow me down as a photographer so I'm back to using old mechanical SLRs. Great video, it was interesting hearing your experiences with the different cameras. There are a lot of amazing film cameras out there that can be had for relatively cheap. Thanks for sharing!
If you were getting consistently out-of-focus shots on something like an A1, assuming you understand the basic idea of split-screen focusing and weren't just guessing, it might have been a misaligned focusing screen. Not to dissuade you from an autofocus film camera, just saying that it might not have been your fault.
