The empire state building was engineered in the 1920's. It is of riveted steel construction with a complex multi-redundant structural system. It was hit by a B-25 head-on in 1945. Minimal damage.
The World Trade Center towers were engineered in the 1970's. They were founded on bedrock, but had a simple bolted structural system: an outer ring of steel H columns, and inner ring of steel columns (surrounding the elevator cores) and light steel "bar joists" between the rings. Each were hit by two fully loaded 737s, much larger and faster than the B-25. The buildings took the impacts (predictably) but the fires did them in (also predictably).
The older building was engineered before computers, so the design calculations were all done by hand. Due to it's complexity and redundancy I can't imagine how long that all took. Factor in all the architectural details, the amount of design and the quality of it all seems almost unachievable. The newer buildings, due to their simple design, I could probably do the design calculations in a week using an excel spreadsheet. So to address your point, no, newer is not better. If fact the opposite is normally the case.
Guys like Blackasshole with no science background think that because the towers collapsed within themselves, that proves it was an inside job. I predicted their collapse within a minute of turning the TV on and seeing the scope of the fires. The American Society of Civil Engineers performed a detailed failure analysis and made the same findings.
