I would ask the poll question differently - not when dit it all go wrong, but when did we go wrong? When did we go luddite? A photographer who embraced the Leica M3 was expecting and using cutting edge technology. Same with the Nikon F, the Spotmatic, the A-1, the M5, the T-90. There’s a train of evolution here that we missed at some point. We are afraid that because photography has become too easy for “the masses”, we might lose our elite status, and thus we get poll options complaining about the ease of use of the Autoreflex and the AE-1 (as if cars only were proper cars before the Model T, because then driving became too easy for the masses). Not to mention how “autofocus makes it too easy”, as if photography was only proper if it was born through artificial hardship. We are more concerned with looks than with content; a Canon EOS-1 looks like plastic, so it has to be plastic and hence Bad - we happily ignore the fact that in spite of its looks it’s a metal body that is more sturdy and lighter than anything ever offered by Leica’s brass bodies, and thus we get poll options complaining about the looks of the T-90.
As long as we can be happy to bend our heads around the quaintness of doing things like they were done fifty years ago, we apparently content ourselves with ignoring and, partly, deriding what has happened elsewhere in the photography world. We are like people who prefer steam-driven trains. It’s all nice and quaint, the way of the 1940s, but at least to me it seems like it’s our idiosyncrasy when we talk about how things went wrong when diesel and electrical engines came about.
(Source: rangefinderforum.com)
