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It's not just that they're the oldest, though that seems to me to be a very good reason to give them priority. Another main reason is that there are several diverse textual strains of textual tradition that tend to agree with each other more than with the later Byzantine texts, and I believe there's also more agreement with earlier church fathers than the Byzantine texts have.

The main idea is that mere raw numbers of manuscrips mean very little if they're all manuscripts of one type. All that means is that whoever had that manuscript strain made lots of copies. But if diverse types agree, then it says something. So text critics tend to pay more attention to multiple manuscript traditions to see which readings are most common and which readings come from manuscript traditions that are temporally closest to the original.

Some of the deciding issues aren't about manuscripts, though. Some readings would make sense as alterations because a scribe might have thought the text he was copying had a mistake in it. Others wouldn't. There are possible variations that can be explained in this way or by a copyist error, when the other direction would make no sense. Often the text critical decision, then, is to go with the reading that someone wouldn't add in later. I believe there are far more of these with the older manuscripts and more of the understandable changes in the Byzantine tradition.

I haven't read much on this stuff in a long time, so I don't remember a lot of the arguments, but that's the sense of what I remember.

An argument often given for the superiority of the Alexandrian text-type is that the kinds of variants usually present in the Byzantine/Majority text are judged to be of a more secondary character (thus indicating a secondary text) than those usually found in the Alexandrian text. Some variants of a secondary character would be harmonization (making parallel passages read the same . . . especially in the synoptic gospels) and conflation (combining two variants to form a third variant . . . for example, rather than choosing "grace" or "peace" the scribe wrote "grace and peace").

There is one main weakness that is often pointed out in Hodges and Farstad's arguments. A large part of their argument is that given a normal transmission history the best readings will be preserved in the majority of manuscripts. This is a fairly persuasive argument (I have heard that the math involved has been questioned, but I'm a seminary student not a mathemetician so I couldn't give an intelligent analysis of that side of it). The weakness that I have most often seen argued (including in a textual criticism class I took in the last year)is that there was NOT a normal transmission history. That is, there are a number of historical factors that can adequately explain the prominance of the Byzantine/Majority text-type and/or decline of the Alexandrian text-type. Probably the biggest one is that fairly early on Greek ceased to be the lingua franca in the Western Roman Empire fairly early in the history of the textual transmission of the NT (I apologize for not remembering exactly how soon . . . been a little while since I took the class). Latin became the spoken language of the Western Empire while Greek remained the spoken language of the Eastern Empire (aka Byzantium). Thus, the argument goes, there was a much higher demand for copies of the Greek Bible in the Eastern Empire so more copies were made of the Byzantine text. Other historical factors that would have affected the transmission of the text (so that it would not progress in a neatly mathematical manner) are empirewide persecutions (the Diocletian persecution specifically targetted Christian manuscripts) and the Muslim invasions (known to have completed the destruction of what was left of the Great Library of Alexandria among other things).

Of course, there are other arguments and counterarguments from both sides, but I thought that one was at least interesting (and I probably haven't presented it nearly as well as I should have, but there it is)