Hi!
I am currently working on a thesis where I really need to get information about things that DSLR users are missing.
Cheers
Obviously on an analog photography site you will get a lot of hyperbole about the subject.
The fact of the matter, digital photographers are not missing anything. If you grew up with digital, your experience with digital is a perfect photographic experience. Image capture, transfer to computer, image selection, retouching, then printing. A perfect photographic method from start to finish.
However of you grew up with analog, your experience was also a perfect experience. BUT it was a DIFFERENT experience. It has a history, over a century old. It has many forms, wet plate, contact print, negative, both color and black and white, camera format choices, and especially chemical printing choices and techniques perfected and modified over the years and a print permanence that is arguably pretty long.
But now it's 2015 and if your goal is to use photography to make prints, either analog or digital will suffice beautifully. If your goal is the process of working slower, more deliberately, and you are more in love with the process of photography, then probably you will find analog a more pleasing pastime.
The term soul is often bandied around and it's probably a good word to describe any type of system that doesn't include the use of digital or computer related process. In music, in photography, in almost any type of "craft" the use of your hands over the use of technology, resonates with people in a visceral way. It has soul, or it has a heartbeat, or it has a human connection, and this is what people crave.
I grew up with analog and I like many switched to digital. Actually I don't miss analog because my goals were different than many here. My goal is the print, and how to get there quickly and efficiently. But many of my processes are still anchored in analog. Time spent before releasing the shutter, I don't delete in camera, I don't machine gun shoot, so my system is sort of hybrid, in that I shoot in an analog mindset but work in a digital space.
But you use the term "missing", and you can't miss what you never knew. I can't miss love, say, if I never experienced it. I can't miss a sunset, if I never experienced it. Millions of people now listen to music on CD or Apple products. Do you really think you can convince them that vinyl was better and they are missing something. We have now a generation, that really knows nothing about analog things, and experiences, but we can't expect then to react to their world as something less than our previous world.
It's just different.