Well I cannot disagree with what you say there Alex.
Funnily enough I have just been reading an article in last weeks Amateur Photographer on Sally Mann. She is using a wet-plate collodion process. Wikipedia link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collodion_process
So as long as there are films and chemicals around then there will always be those prepared to have a go at something a bit different from the norm.
Reminds me of my entry to 5x4 when I got a De-Vere for nothing. A bit tweeky about lashing out on sheet film and a load of double darkslides at that stage, I set of with some Polariod 54 or 55, an instant negative film, and then contact printed them on paper coated with liquid emulsion so something well different from my norm which was 35mm at the time.
Dave, Jim's dad, still uses film as he does all sorts of different processing effects which he loves, to achieve what would probably be impossible on digital. No real surprise then that Jim is also becoming film mad even though he has a D200.
Writing this also reminds me how I became fascinated with what was becoming achievable with the digital medium in 2002.
Back in the 1990's I was doing publicity photography for the company I worked for, so a secondary activity. Often I was doing a fair bit of of stuff on very tight timelines, and could be in the darkroom until 3 or 4 in the morning doing mailshot 6x4 Cibachrome prints. By 1997 I was looking at photography as just another job, and it lost its appeal as a hobby, and that is when I took up model engineering as a substitute. By 2001 our production engineers were using a digital compact and I was suitably impressed. I then switched from medium format and bought a D100, and at the same time our publicity department got desktop publishing. To all intents and purposes we now had a seriously compressed time line. Not instant, but by comparison with the old days, pretty quick imaging, publishing and distribution. No more burning the midnight oil in the darkroom.
The ability to easily experiment with areas of photography I had not really tried before then took a bit of a hold. So in the end it is digital imaging that brought me back into photography as a hobby. For myself digital has a way to go before it loses any of its shine, but I still appreciate that there are others that enjoy all of the other photographic mediums.
Don