I think it was pretty well always the case that the photographer made more difference than the kit, I remember a famous case here where back in the 1950s a pro photographer took a stunning picture with an amateur camera to prove it wasn't all his Rolleiflex making the pictures.
I would say that the biggest change over the time I have been interested by photographic equipment was the technical skill required to get a good image.
Getting an in focus, properly exposed photograph took a lot of skill and knowledge when I was a kid with my first camera in 1961. It had manual focus and both the distance and exposure had to be either guessed or measured - and I could afford neither a rangefinder or exposure meter.
Nowadays, apart from the limitation that the exposure meter is of necessity reflective rather than incident, which is in principle wrong but the error cleverly hidden for most pictures with digital sensors by algorithms using the whole frame, all technical skill is built into the camera and the photographer no longer require much, if any.
But still standing in the right place and pressing the shutter at the right moment are the most important skills for a good photograph, and these aren't automated yet.
Each picture was a non negligible cost to a schoolboy so I thought long and hard about taking an exposure. Very few people had a camera at all and outside enthusiasts those that did mainly took one roll of film per year on holiday - here in the UK anyway! Now everybody has one on a phone and take a gazillion free pictures per day.
HiFi and photography often appeal to the same sort of person. As with hifi there is a broad range of enthusiasm from the mainly the kit to mainly using it. In my case I am far more interested in listening to music than playing around with kit but with photography I am more the other way - I enjoy playing around with, understanding and using the kit more than I do image making.
Sorry.
I spent almost half my working life as a photojournalist and you are absolutely right- it's the photographer, not the kit. Those photographers that used to show up with a ton of kit around their necks were rarely the ones that got the best shots.
When I was in college in the 70s doing my NUJ course we ran a little experiment. The college limited us to how many rolls of film we could have for an assignment - usually only one or two. We kept a record of which shot was the one that we chose to use from the roll. It was almost inevitably within the first 15 shots on the first roll, very rarely was a later shot chosen.
Of course, this ability to get the good picture early also paid dividends in the real world back at the newspaper. With half a dozen photographers on staff and only one darkroom there was often competition as to who would get to use the darkroom first. There was no door, it used a series of light traps, so anyone of us could come in at anytime to develop, but there was a limited number of development tanks. If you had many rolls to develop you'd keep your work colleagues waiting which wasn't appreciated. There was also limited space in the drying cabinet, so we had to try and share it equally.
I don't do much photography these days other than on my phone, but my son is a motor sports fan and regularly uses my old Nikon lenses on his DSLR, most recently on a weekend at Donnington Park.
My hifi is pretty much settled too, so I don't play around much with that, but I have thoroughly enjoyed restoring a Rock-Ola jukebox this year.
and is normally the widest I carry.
