"....and there is no new thing under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 1:9 (King James Bible)
The first part of my career was spent at New Zealand's central bank (the Reserve Bank of N.Z.), where I was heavily involved in the construction and use of large-scale macroeconometric models. By the mid 1970's our models involved more than 100 equations (of which about 50 were structural relationships that had to be estimated; and the rest were accounting identities). The basic investigative estimation was undertaken using OLS; and variants such as the Almon estimator for distributed lag models. Boy, this dates me!
Of course, we were well aware that OLS wasn't appropriate for the finished product. These models were simultaneous equations models, so OLS was inconsistent. Obviously, something more appropriate was need, but which estimator should we use?