I can't see how it would have been better with a 6502. The 8080 family had multiple clock cycles per instruction cycle, thus if you are hooking up a scope and watching, there is more going on to see, and if you grok what's happens at each clock transition, you will have learned more about timing and the internal propagation of signals through stages of logic gates. It's somewhat similar to CISC vs RISC, both may be elegant designs, but understanding more complexity is a greater intellectual puzzle and the 8085 had more microcode.