I tend to roll my eyes when a photography debate turns to a battle of mathematical formula interpretation. I do often relate to a couple of personal experiances, one I was thumbing through various books (mostly landscape) in a book shop, nothing really grabbed my attention, they all had that out for a walk look and grabbed a few shots at twilight feel. Then I picked up a book and even though it was less than A4 in size it screamed LF and the LF thinking had carried on to the repro and layout, you know the get it right mentality.
Yes, skill does have a lot to do with it. LF and MF tends to be a bit more old-school compose the shot feel to it. And I like it myself, to be honest. I think it's really a matter of having one lens and one camera and pretty much having to work with it as-is. I've been known to wait minutes to get the right shot. A lot of stuff in books now does look like they took 5 seconds to shoot it.
As I said, the difference seems to be between professional printing and home printing. In a high quality book where they are using a lithograph/4 color process at 1400-2400dpi, yes, you'll see 4 X 5 showing more detail. And if you do that sort of work, by all means go as large as you feel comfortable with. Film and larger formats shine here, to be honest. But a lot of that has to do with the 2 ft or less viewing distance as well.(arm's length)
But for the rest of us, ink jets and dye sub printers now lag greatly behind the level of detail in the typical camera. They have grown at an astonishing rate and we're still using decade old technology to print it out. So it's not surprising that on a home printer, the lines get blurry and it all starts to look the same unless you print stupidly large prints. ~24X36 is typical painting on the wall size, after all...
Note - I can see the difference between an ink jet and a lithograph at 5-10ft, but it's an overall impression and not actual detail difference. I think the reflectivity and smoothness isn't the same on an ink jet, though it is getting closer. I suspect that there is a great difference between the inks that the manufacturers aren't quite coming clean with us about. In any case, it's certainly a case of the cameras being good enough - the printing is now lagging behind.
