Why was the 3.8 litre v6 1989 Essex engine so bad?

I have an 89 ford thunderbird with the above engine in it. It only gets 140 hp and 215 ft pounds of torque? Like what the heck. Is the fuel computer just calibrated to a lean fuel air ratio? Is the stroke really short? Is it just highly ineficient? I would greatly apreciated if someone could shed some light on this. 3.8 litres is a lot of engine, am I mistaken in assuming that it should be better than it is?

If you compare other engines of the same year you will see that this falls right in line with the competition! The sole exception I'm aware of was the SHO engine that was a 3.0.
Horse power is not what is important in getting a car rolling- that is what the torque figures are about. There's a reason why Carol Shelby said-
"Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races!"
In 1988 it was not unusual to find cars with a speedometer that only went to 85 mph. The horse power wars started back up in 1989. So it is more of a year thing!

The problem is that it was 1989. With very few exceptions, most (American) engines of that era had terrible HP/L. If I remember correctly the 80's Corvettes had maybe 180-200 hp out of 5.7L. It's simply an issue of a weak cam, weak fuel delivery and a restrictive intake manifold.

Don't feel bad. I had an '84 Cougar with the Essex, and it put out 120 hp and 205 lb-ft. Then again, it had the old TBI. And the stroke isn't that short: the 3.8L version is 3.81 x 3.39. But Ford apparently figured that in this class, buyers wanted torque monsters and didn't care about the top end that much, unless they were willing to spring for the supercharged version.