Tommy Armour is excellent. When they were still around they were as well respected as anyone in the biz. The quality of Nickent is very good, another brand that should have been successful, but fell victim to bad business decisions rather than bad products.
You have to understand that pretty much all the major brands are produced in the same Chinese foundries and assembled in the same Chinese sweatshops by the same laborers. Even the uber-cheap knockoffs and clones are coming off the same lines made of the same materials as the big boys. The only difference between a $1000 set of Nikes and a $200 set of something else is that Nike has to pay Tiger to pretend he uses the stuff.
It's amazing how quickly the golf landscape changes. Those Titleist DTRs you mentioned earlier were from the 80s. At that time Titleist was okay, Wilson, Ram, Ping and Hogan were the real high end brands played by the most successful tour pros and stuff like Spalding and Northwestern were the bargain brands. Callaway was a niche product making fake wooden shafted clubs, Taylormade had just come out and sold nothing but metal woods, Nike didn't have any golf products. Bidgestone, Srixon and Adams didn't exist. By the 90s Ram was pretty much gone, Wilson was fading, Hogan was fading, Tommy Armour and Mizuno were rising, Nike still didn't exist until much later in the decade, Taylormade tried to expand from metalwoods to full line and their stuff SUCKED. Callaway took off thanks to the Big Bertha and good marketing. Spalding bought Hogan, then Callway bought Spalding to get their ball patents, Taylormade bought other peoples designs and finally made decent clubs, then marketed the shit out of it and got successful, Adams rose, fell, rose again, it's been crazy.
The real problem now is that the USGA and the R&A have locked down real innovation. Nothing has truly improved in the equipment area in more than 10 years. The balls are the same multi-layer urethane cover, 460cc titanium drivers were around then and have not been allowed to grow or get "hotter", hybrids are the same, wedges are the same, irons are the same, putters are the same. The industry tried square drivers, those failed. They tried triangular drivers, those failed. They tried moveable weights, those failed. The big thing now is adjustability. Great for fitting, but once you dial it in you never change it, so even that doesn't make the clubs better. You could easily buy stuff from 12-15 years ago and it would not be one iota worse than the stuff rolling off the assembly line now. Hell, there are guys on tour that are still using Ping irons from the 80s, fairway woods from the 90s and balls that are several model lines old because they like those better than the newer ones. Nike in particular has a bunch of their staffers using 8 year old Tour One D balls because the20xi that replaced it sucked and the RZN that replaced the 20xi sucked worse.
Don't get caught up in names or newest and shiniest. It's all pretty much the same stuff and whether you can play or not is entirely up to you, not the clubs. As you're essentially a beginner you want easy to hit and something that suits your talent level (or lack thereof), not top of the line or tour level or latest and greatest.