Sufficiently-outdated technology gathers a beauty and mystique about it as nothing else is able. It's an attraction similar to nature — as if it simply grew that way, all brass and leather and green plate glass — while maintaining that aura of human endeavour.
And somehow, it's specifically human in an age which has given us successively more-inhuman levels of technology: an age which prides the distinction, rather than union, of man and machine. Simply look at a car. Say a modern sports car of some stripe: a red 2005 Mustang would do as well as any. There's a simple and easy line between operator and apparatus: the operator controls the vehicle and the vehicle performs in a predictable fashion.
Now consider a chocolate-brown Ford Model A. Operator attuned the the ever-changing sound of his engine, the ever-fluctuating — now-easy, now-sluggish — movement of the wheel, the feel of the ground beneath him. The driver of a Model A still controls his vehicle, but he must, for lack of a better term, communicate with it in an ongoing relationship.
And of course, piloting an airship wearing brass Steampunk goggles is just fun.