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Inferior instrument?

Different, yes--but not "inferior".

As with any instrument that has evolved through time, there are tradeoffs. While the modern piano has more volume and power, it also does a poorer job of dampening--the dampers are simply undersized for the job of stopping the vibrations of that massive string band. For some music (I'm thinking here of 18th century music such Mozart and Haydn), there is simply too much sound, and the performer's job becomes one of "taming" the instrument and making it fit the music.

By comparison, the early piano (particularly the Viennese models, both pre- and post 1800) dampens better, and as a consequence, is able to articulate better. Runs and fast passages are cleaner, also due to the lighter, more responsive mechanism (keyboard).

An offshoot of this is that counterpoint is cleaner when rendered on the early piano. The inner voices are usually better contrasted against one another. This is an effect that is lost with the homogenized sound of the modern piano.

There are also tonal differences between the registers, and this comes into play in Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Beethoven, in particular, was fond of closely-spaced chords in the low bass, which by and large sound muddy and unintelligible on the modern piano. On a Viennese piano, those chords are rendered correctly and musically.

So your claim of "inferior" is in my estimation a bogus one, certainly not one shared by scholars, piano builders, even many modern pianists. Different, yes, and that difference can be illuminating, even if your preference is for the modern piano.

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