Thanks for sharing your good experience. I will try again and see.

What's the visa number of previous visas? Is it in the ETA?

I managed to find my old passport and this is the case.

Confused between E-visa and Regular (stamped on passport) visa
 

The E-visa website: https://indianvisaonline.gov.in/evisa/tvoa.html - states that a person (US Citizen) can get an E-visa for 1-month or 1-year or 5-years validity.
It seems the 1 or 5 year E-visa can have multiple entries with stays up to 180 days for US citizens.

If this is correct, why would anyone go through the process of getting a regular visa stamped on the passport at the Indian embassy?

Am i missing something?

They simplified the process making the regular visa unnecessary in most cases

Thank you very much for this!

That is great to hear! When was this change made?

Sometime in 2017 the ETA scheme was expanded to include business travel and long term multiple entry visa.

There's no doubt that the process has simplified things for a great majority of travelers to India. However... The e-visa scheme only covers tourists, business travelers, and travel for medical treatment. For a wide range of other travel purposes and with various conditions, you'll still need to apply for the regular visa. E.g., if you're going to work or study in India, if you're a journalist or shooting a movie, if you want to enter India at any airport other than the couple of dozen airports that the e-visa permits, or if you want to enter by road, rail, or sea, if you're part of a cruise / group tour, if you're a citizen of one of many countries for whom the e-visa is not available, if you're a religious missionary, or if you're seeking visas for long stay and residence in India. You may be surprised to learn how many different kinds of travel happen to India; it is, after all, a vast country and people travel to it for hundreds of reasons. What we see on FlyerTalk might be a very small slice (in terms of variety) of these. In my opinion, it's great that they've simplified the process for the most common reasons for travel, and hopefully the consulates can focus on processing all the other travel visa requests in a more efficient way.

I last travelled to India on a eVisa 2 years ago and was stuck in the immigration queue for over an hour, despite only a few people ahead of me.
Is the waiting time atill this bad?

In the larger aiports they have adjusted the infrastructure and layout because the bulk of the visitors now come with eTAs. In DEL for example a completely new bank of 12(?) desks was put in which now deal with eTAs only.

It's way better now at DEL at least, but it's bad enough at times that I am willing to deal with the hassles of having passports submitted for physical Indian visas so as to minimize the gamble on arrival.

That does not sound too convincing. I will be applying for a regular visa then.

If you are only doing one or two visits to India, it may not be worth it to do the regular visa if you don't need to do it. Dealing with getting an Indian physical visa is also not a fun process for all. :D

Most of the people with whom I go to India go to India often enough that it's not just one or two visits to India; any many a trip for some of us to India involve two or more entries into India as we may use India as a regional base for travels.

I'm used to applying for the regular visa, so not a big hassle. Just a bit more expensive, but worth it, since I am in no mood queueing for 1 hour+ (again) at 1 in the morning ;)