We are humans. Our ancestors put on clothes and lit fires because it was more comfortable than toughing it out. They hunted with spears because it was easier and resulted in more food than hunting with a club. They learned to distribute tasks because it required less brain power than doing and knowing everything themselves. (Look it up: our brains have been shrinking for the last 40,000 years as we have become more civilized and spread the knowledge and tasks around.)
It just wouldn't be natural if most of us, and especially the serious ones, went back to running around naked, clubbing our photos with MF cameras and processing them ourselves, would it?
I actually started with MF. It was a Kodak Brownie that shot 620 film (essentially the same as 120 but with a slightly different spool rim diameter.) I bought it with my weeding money in about 1966 because it was all I could afford on the flea market table. Film was painfully expensive when you had to pull thousands of dandelions to buy a roll and get it processed. But it really forced me to learn about light. Though at that age it was mostly about making sure there was enough of it, that it was coming from the right direction, and eventually to watch the shadows as much as the subject. In 1968 I saved up $4 to buy an Instamatic. With a flash cube! That's when I learned about shutter speeds. I read that the camera used a slower shutter speed when the flash cube was attached, so I peered into the socket and saw the little switch that caused the change. I found that I could stick a broken toothpick in there and depress the switch and thus had a two speed camera without flash. (Didn't occur to me until later that I could have just hung on to a used cube to achieve the same result.)
In 1975 I joined the Navy and bought an Olympus OM-1n. With food and shelter paid for I had the cash to pay for plenty of shots. So I brought back plenty of photos of Adak, Alaska. The only ones I was really proud of were the B&W ones that I developed and printed myself in the hobby photo lab. I went through a couple of other 35mm cameras, and other MF cameras and became very good. I was able to shoot just about any photo I wanted with the composition, exposure, depth of field, everything the way I wanted it, but I was still mostly proud of the B&W shots that I printed myself. I even built a nice big darkroom into my house in 1990.
Then along came digital. Even the best digital cameras back then produced crap photos compared to film, but you could do so much with Photoshop (if you could afford it.) I went through a few digital cameras, but eventually became disillusioned. With digital, improving my photos became a matter of how much money I could spend on a new camera rather than how much brainpower I could apply to my shots. I had moved and no longer had a darkroom, I could not afford the really high end DSLRs that promised to almost equal 35mm, and I was getting fat sitting on my butt in front of the screen. I haven't taken a photo - other than cell phone shots - for 3 or 4 years. Instead I have focused more on painting and mostly on sculpture. I guess it's the caveman in me.
I've started reading about modern DSLRs with ISO equivalents in the hundred thousand range (!) and MF like resolution. I need to learn if their dynamic range has caught up with film yet. The thing I hated most about DSLRs was their very poor dynamic range. I'm about at the point where I can build another darkroom in my current house, so this discussion is of great interest to me. Do I want to go back to the club or go modern or should I let someone else do the hunting and keep sculpting?
Still deciding...
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