My best answer is entanglement, described earlier.
Alright, but that one doesn't work for me, and I doubt it's universal. At least it's not in the way you explained it in the opening post, as a way we would supposedly experience meaning. Here's an example that debunks it:
A few years ago, I was looking at some prints of Rineke Dijkstra in a museum. They were part of the 'beach teenagers' series she made in the early 1990s - so definitely shot on film. The prints were labeled as 'c-prints'. What I do not know, and to this day don't know, is whether those c-prints were part of optically-enlarged editions of prints made by Peter Svenson in his lab, in close association with the photographer, or if they were later digitally exposed c-prints. Lacking a magnifier and framed behind glass, I simply could not tell if they were optically or digitally exposed.
Apparently, quantum entanglement didn't help me, either. I could discern no characteristic of my mental process of finding meaning in these images that suggested that either these prints were entangled with the actual scene. I could only take these prints for what they were - large, confronting images of young people wearing the expressions you'd expect of a 14-year old in a bathing suit being put in front of a camera operated by a woman with piercing eyes.
The problem with this concept of entanglement, at least how I understand it, is that it does not convey to the viewer. Objectively, it just doesn't - it falls dead on the floor the moment the story about its conception is separated from the print.
Still, I do understand how and why you come up with it as the best approximation of what you feel is going on. But I think we need to dig one layer deeper, and make things a little more explicit and tangible, to get rid of another serious problem. This problem is that people are, as you implied before as well, people are personally invested into something, and they will emphasize its value over other things. In this particular case, we run the real risk that as darkroom printers, we are captive of our own prints because of the time, effort and inspiration we put into making these prints. All this work remains an unalienable part of the final product -
for us, but not for the external, objective observer.
I'm currently working on a series of portraits, shot on Portra 400 6x6cm and Foma 200 8x10". The prints I make are optically enlarged C-prints for the Portra shots - at least for the series as I intend it to be. Of course, all sitters receive a set of prints, or digital files, as they prefer. And I know for a fact that none of them would appreciate or even be aware of it if I put digitally exposed c-prints in their hands instead of home-made, enlarger-exposed ones. In fact, the odds are that they will greatly prefer the digital versions, because they are of objectively higher quality in virtually every way over the optical ones I make. E
ven worse - the one person who really pressed me for some prints only wants them to be as big as I could make them so he can gift them as a present to his wife, who will probably tape them to a door in their home. I inkjet printed those on A2 Epson photo paper - the largest size my printer at home can handle. No sign whatsoever on the side of the sitters/recipients of the prints that they prefer a certain type of print.
They care about the image. They care to an extent about who made it, and why, and about the interaction between them and the maker. They do not care, nor are they aware of the production process of the prints. I believe that this is true for the vast majority (let's say 99.998%) of the general population, mostly because
they are not captive of the process of making the prints the way we (you and I) are, as darkroom workers.
So to get this theory of entanglement in the realm of viability, we'll have to prevent it from becoming entangled (hah!) with our own cognitive dissonance. Because
that is what I believe constitutes the lion's share of the appreciation of analog prints, especially among photographers.
I also love how my chromogenic prints came out on the cheapest Fuji paper from medium format, in terms or resolution, my inkjet was so so. For black and white I can made better resolution than inkjet. Materiality you can call it. The only thing I need to work on are the blacks, which don't seem black enough on silver-gelatin.
There are objective qualities to printing processes that constitute real, observable differences. They virtually always constitute a tradeoff between various characteristics. As such, I've never been able to discern a tendency of the balance tipping in favor of analog prints. If there were, I couldn't explain the inkjet (sorry, 'giclee') prints on countless museum and gallery walls, or in private collections, nor the countless square miles of digitally exposed c-prints churned out on a weekly basis by computer-dominated industrial labs.
My post my sound cynical to you, but it truly isn't. In a way, I agree with you - or at least, I
want to agree with you. But so far, after having thought about the question on and off for a decade or so, I have not been able to figure out what the
valid reason would be. So far, the best I can come up with is that there is no truly valid reason, and that it's just personal preference, resulting mostly from cognitive dissonance combined with a penchant towards getting my hands wet in the darkroom, and that the narrative that's constructed in this way is contrived and very difficult to sell (economically or otherwise) to someone who does not share my specific set of experiences and preferences.
I still have my hopes set on you for finding a more solid conceptual basis, but I repeat what I said before: it's going to take some intellectual exercise to get it done. Merely mentioning ill-conceived parallels (the painting vs. the inkjet) doesn't cut it, neither the conceptual equivalent of entanglement (which I would suggest to leave in the realm it originates from, i.e. theoretical physics), because none of those parallels or figures of speaks hold up once you systematically analyze them and realize that the fundamentally different boundary conditions under which they operate simply do not translate into the world of photography. The solution will really have to be inside the field of photography, and will have to be a credible, consistent and well-formed conceptual argumentation that stands on its own.
www.photrio.com
So I:m forced to digitize and post on YouTube, Flickr or make slide shows for presenting on my 75" 4K TV. Creating videos is very creative and fun as well. I;ve also done a zine. I can still do prints digitally and send to relatives who have more wall space. 
