Not everyone had the space for a permanent or even semi-permanent darkroom. I found that one of the biggest frustrations was the time spent on clearing a space, blacking-out the windows, etc., meant that half the time was
not spent on actually doing anything photographic. Doing everything at night (not too difficult in the winter) helped but there was always the problem of dust from moving stuff around no matter how clean you
thought the room was!
I can't remember the last time I printed a B/W photo, now, having shot almost exclusively on slide film for quite a few years before I 'went digital.' Although I've got a film scanner to digitise my old films, I've found that the old rule of 'slightly' under-exposing reversal film in order to avoid washed-out slides has worked against me as dense slides don't scan very well at all (at least with my Minolta Scan Dual 111 they don't!).
With digital, as well as 'straight' prints you can try all sorts of effects that were time-consuming or out of reach with film - the danger, of course, is over-doing an effect or doing shot after shot with the same effect ('enough is as good as a feast' as I quoted on the Infra-red thread
).
Whereas a few years ago getting a digital photo to look like a 'real' photo was a goal, nowadays getting an over-saturated 'super'-real photo seems to be the aim of many people. I wonder what the next 'trend' will be?