There's a difference between under exposing in the camera and printing the image dark.
In The Camera
Film which is exposed per the manufacturer recommendation (if any) will get the most tonal information on the film with the most accurate color rendering and the least noise. Speaking very roughly. Adjusting exposure and processing will do several things: change the characteristic curve, change the color rendering, change the degree of grain. More or less. Film "fails" in subtle and complex ways which may achieve a desirable result.
Digital sensors "fail" in three ways: throw information off the bottom, throw information off the top, introduce ugly looking digital noise. The artistic possibilities are rather thinner.
With digital, the analog of film push/pull processing to to expose correctly and adjust the characteristic curve in post, and remap colors around as desired. If what you want is a bunch of plaid noise and/or blocked up shadows or highlights, by all means exposé badly in camera. You will NOT be adjusting characteristic curves, you will typically NOT be having any desirable effects in color rendering, you will NOT be adjusting film grain appearance. It's digital noise and blocked up crud all day long.
In The Print
This is completely separate from in the camera. Yes, a dark and moody look is a thing, so is a blown out skies, the histogram can look like whatever you want it to, it's art. It's also got very little to do with the original exposure. With film there is a connection, to a greater or lesser degree. With digital the connection is, or at any rate can be, much more tenuous.
In Conclusion
​When someone makes a point about in camera exposure, some remark about the print does not constitute a rebuttal, and vice versa. There are at least two separate topics here and as far as I can tell nobody knows it.
Also, film and digital act differently. They're remarkably similar when you're staying inside the manufacturer specs, but they diverge with great rapidity once you start over or under driving the system. The "failure" modes are light years apart.
You may have been writing about those things and others may have, but I have been referring strictly to in-camera exposure (well, yes, and how it affects the final image after editing).
Editing/grading is a powerful tool, but I think too many in this day and age use it as a crutch. On almost every shoot I am on as a cinematographer these days someone says of a difficulty framing, lighting, exposure or pretty much any thing else photographic: "Don't worry, we'll fix it in post". Or of a look striven for in camera I often get - "oh, don't worry, we'll do that in post"...
The fact of the matter is you can't always do it "in post". Or at least do it the same. I'll give you an example.
I shot a TV series and the first 1/2 hour of the first episode was a flashback to the time the character spent in a jail in Venezuela. I had an idea that I pitched to the director, who loved it: handheld, warmish, very contrasty and SUPERgrainy. The producers weren't so sure. We were set to shoot with the Sony F900 cine-alta (the most expensive camera at the time), but I asked the producers to let me test 6 different cameras. At first they said, "Oh, don't worry, we'll get the look you want in post." I cringed then convinced them to pay for the tests and decide after. (I told them I might be able to save them some money
"Doing it in post" at $750/hr is costly!)
So I tested 6 cameras in bright sun at 18db (noise/grain usually used to boost the camera by adding signal to the native image to artificially brighten it - something people generally only do in extreme low light. 18db is the most "noisy" you can go on most cameras). The producers were astounded with the results: each camera's images looked radically different - the f900, their camera of choice, rendered a very ugly image, though perhaps useful in another context: green hued with a noise profile that looked like a billion pixels puking at once!
The other cameras rendered images that were very different though not ugly. The producers pointed at one image and said - we love it, that's the one! It was the camera I secretly wanted to use (the panasonic sdx 900) and would cost them about $600 less per day to shoot with over 75 days of shooting. I had saved them 45 grand and 5-10 hours at 750/hr in post. And got what I wanted. And got them hooked - when I work with them now the first thing they ask me is "what camera should we rent you." I won an award for that show - and they sent the first episode with that footage in as their sample for consideration.
The images from the sdx 900 were degraded radically, but had a beautiful "grain structure" that was kind of like B&W film like because the specks were all black - the other cameras' noise looked like coloured specks and were nowhere near as appealing. I find it a shame these days that EVERYTHING is done in post, because before, film stocks were chosen not just for their sensitivity to light, but for their characteristic curves and the different ways they each reacted to pushing, pulling, "over" and "under" exposing and pretty much everything else photographic. The camera was basically just a box that held the lens and the film, so your look depended on choices you made before shooting and were enhanced or underlined after. These days, in TV and cinema more often than not, a camera is foisted on you because of availability or budget or both. So you are limited as to what you can choose to do in camera, and, to boot, everyone has jumped on this (ironically expensive!) bandwagon of doing everything in post.
In still photography, editing is generally done by the photographer with his own computer, so the price is not a factor. But one thing I lament about digital is that often a person can only afford one camera, or 2 if they are lucky (but even then often the same brand with the same (or similar) sensor.). Because the sensor and the analog to digital converter are the equivalent of a filmstock, it means, to a degree, one is limited to the strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncrasies of one camera and only one single point of departure to get creative. (And I fully realize there are many other ways of getting creative in photography, but to me, this is one powerful tool removed from the arsenal).
So yes, film and digital are very different. But in the case of underexposure, or boosting with gain, or using high ISOs, there is still much that can be gleaned of interest from various sensors, and to say that the goal in digital photography is ALWAYS to get the most information possible is limiting yourself in the same way that shooting everything on a filmstock and ALWAYS following the manufacturer's EI does.
"In The Print
This is completely separate from in the camera. Yes, a dark and moody look is a thing, so is a blown out skies, the histogram can look like whatever you want it to, it's art. It's also got very little to do with the original exposure. With film there is a connection, to a greater or lesser degree. With digital the connection is, or at any rate can be, much more tenuous."
I disagree. The digital connection to the print is much closer than you permit, given what I wrote above. You can still have a wonky looking in camera histogram that will make beautiful images (if one is crafty) that will be completely different from doing it in a post histogram, much the way that underrating a filmstock and printing up is completely different from lowering the contrast with a knob in post. And these in-camera "processed" images will look very different from one camera to another as well. It's just that photographers, as noted above, don't always have access to different brands of cameras with different sensors. Which I think has mitigated the transition away from in-camera toward post editing.
The "failure modes" of film and digital are "light years" apart, I concur - but difference does not imply inferiority. Maybe digital is inferior in this respect (I tend to think so) - but not to the degree you believe.
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