Ansel Adams did lots of post processing!!!
This is true... yet altogether different?
Certain things you can get form Photoshop just by reading a guide on the internet, where as developing film takes a lot of time, skill and trial and error. Real life does not have CTRL+ALT+Z.
Exposing your paper to juuust the right amount of light - too much and it's ruined. No undoing. You could probably develop it again and it would take time, you'd gain experience.
Lets take the industrial revolution as an example. Thousands of farmers and labourers went bust because of steam power. Developing film is a manual art perfected over 100 years. Lightroom was released 4 years ago, the computer compensating for what was missed while shooting, practically automatically.
Or another example, Schools have stopped teaching children how to write in cursive. Why? Overuse of computers. Cursive was developed to be able to write at length with speed and ease. (wait, that's not the point...), the manual art of cursive may be lost within the following generation giving way to computers. You receive an e-mail. Okay, you get them everyday. You receive a handwritten posted letter of thanks, it goes to your heart.
Same thing with the overuse of wikipedia, children are losing an ability to figure things out for themselves, they don't know what it is to scourge a library for three different Encyclopaedias, R volume, to look up Romulan (sic) Romanian history. It's long, difficult and tedious. Just Wiki it.
Same thing with the highly interconnected world, children are no long bored. Which is a bad thing, the lose of introspection and growth. Sorry, I'm going off on a tangent.
Yes, I do use a dSLR and I find them wonderful. However, you'd be missing a lot by shooting in Pure Automatic or Program modes (and hopefully if some one reading this does, I am hoping they will read a guide and try Av). You need to have a certain understanding of theory.
I find myself at a lack of words. It is merely the way I feel. The more I photograph, the more I find myself moving towards a purer and purer medium. I activated the Image verification Certificate to be able to say "I really and truly took this.". More and more I am wanting to shoot film, the development of film an extension of shooting it.
I do realise the same could be said of Digital and Adobe, a lot can be handled within the Camera itself. Hues, Tones, White Balance, Colour Correction, blurring the right part of the image, filters, etc - you don't need Adobe for that, just an understanding of the way things work.
Again, it's just the way I feel. I would be much more impressed by a nice unAdobe'd picture than an amazing spectacular one which was.
In case all this makes it sound as though I'm 60, I'm not. I'm 23 and am just starting to learn about photography, even if I have been trying things out, reading articles and learning from my father since in my mid teens. I don't know everything, which is why I'm here, to improve without the crutch which is Adobe.
Because knowledge is power (and that's half the battle).