In its day, your Le Tour was not a cheap bike. Cheap bikes then had squashed and spot welded fork and chain stay ends and all heavy steel components. That Le Tour was better than my old Continental and would weigh less. $1000 is about the cheapest for a usuable bike that you would put real miles on these days. To me, expensive is more like $3K on up. If you ride 20 miles 12 times a month then your equipment has to be up to it. Decent riding kit alone (shoes, helmet, padded shorts, Jerseys, gloves, outer layers, computers, glasses, blinking lights, etc) gets you past $1K all by themself pretty quickly. So to answer your question, yes a new truly expensive bike will perform better than the Le Tour, especially if you do hills, but to really gain the benefits, the proper kit needs to be used a long with it. This assumes your bike is properly sized to you.