For technical reasons inherent in the chosen standard, NTSC TV sets required hue and color knobs, unlike PAL and SECAM. This effectively left it up to the consumer to adjust those values, with no accounting for variances in eyesight or taste. Unfortunately it meant that entire households had to endure the choices of whomever (Dad?) controlled the TV. On visits to others' homes it was painful to see how apallingly bad some peoples' preferences were. With PAL and SECAM the hue and colors were set to a standard, and that was that. Having said all that, the 29.97fps frame rate of NTSC was much easier on the eyes than the flickering 25fps of PAL and SECAM.
NTSC adopted the color system it did because the cost of delay lines was considered to be too high, PAL also was more technically complex and probably would have delayed the adoption of Color TV, which was unacceptable to RCA.
The US oft has this problem, we tend to be early adopters of technology on a wide scale, so by the time a thing comes along that solves most of the inherent problems in the v1, we already have a wide scale implementation of the thing. This happened with TV color, phones (24 Channel T1 vs 32 channel E1 and aLaw/uLaw), credit cards (mag stripes), and all sorts of other things.
SECAM had some real advantages, but made working with composite signals hard, because of their FM nature. PAL and NTSC are reasonably close conceptually, and frankly so is PAL, you can easily encode PAL into SECAM, because it's mostly the composite signals that are different.
NTSC was originally 525 lines/60 fields per second (odd/even lines) giving an effective refresh of 30 fps, the 525 lines itself was dictated by our 6MHz channel width, and the field refresh by our 60Hz power. When they added color, they dropped the field refresh down to 59.97 to deal with a beat frequency issue between the color subcarrier and the audio subcarrier.
I'm guessing that watching PAL/SECAM requires slightly slower phosphors that NTSC and you'd see flicker on a modern computer monitor designed for 60-75 HZ ....
Did you try and adjust the hue? That was a necessary step in getting the colours right over in NTSC land. If you didn't adjust it, yes, you got pictures that were too magenta or too green. That said, I have an NTSC LaserDisc player still plugged in today, and if the hue is appropriately set, the colours are perfectly fine.
Yes - in the US HDTV was a revelation for many people because of the much larger colour gamut, it was just so much better, in Europe is was mostly just bigger
The French SECAM system? 'Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method'
I'll lead myself out.