The times, they are a changin'. I think that was a song or a movie or something.

Historically speaking, I look back at the birth of photography and what that did to painting. You had a handful western masters every generation who spent a life-time perfecting what they perceived to be "realism" and what it meant to create and preserve an image, then along comes photography which meant that any rich schmuck with money to burn on some equipment and chemicals could preserve an image even more "realistic" than those masters, and that forced painting to go through a massive identity crisis starting with the impressionists, and of course all of modern art tumbled out after that.

Then, if you focus on the course of photography itself, it starts off as this kind of expensive and (comparatively) difficult esoteric mix of science and art that is striving for, but always falling short of, a paragon of "realism." There were many creative people really thinking about the mechanical simulacra and the caliber and creativity of common photography was very high. Then Kodak came along and put a brownie in everyone's hands and chemistry caught up to the point where "realism" was a foregone conclusion; hyper-realism blinded everyone to the difference between image and subject. When everyone could just snap a photo, the concept of artistic photography had to change and so we went from Lange's Migrant Mother to Serrano's Piss Christ.

We've been living in this hyper-real world for a while now; look at Game of Thrones, it's more real than reality could ever hope to be, as a kind of professional gold standard. However, technology has been changing and it's making things accessible on a new and different level. I'm still not sure what effect it will have on art/film/photography in twenty or thirty years; there is a lot of pressure on the "old masters" so-to-speak. Looking at GoT and comparing it with something from the seventies or eighties, it's easy to see they've been able to up production values thanks to technological advancements, and that's always the challenge, how to maintain one's position as the creative avant-garde. I share your disdain for dredged-up youtube shite, but we cannot deny that the mediums and modes of artistic audiovisual production are inexorably changing. C'est la vie.

I firmly believe that as long as what you make is fresh and creative there will always be a place for it. Sometimes you need those difficult technical skills at the envelope of your equipment to stay on that edge, sometimes technology is an earthquake that brings a whole new set of people, skills and equipment onto that edge.