Well its not that Ford came with crappy stuff as much as that GM implemented some huge improvements in suspension design in the early 60's and the best of them are easy to adapt to your '69.
Some of them can be adapted to a 50's frame, but lots of guys have just swaped frames instead. The S-10 swap is popular on '47 to '54 Chevy trucks too.
I don't want to come off defending Fords, because that's certainly not who I am, but in this case the same swap is popular under both brands for basically the same reasons.
