With all do respect zero's and one's has as much to do with good images as an ink has to do with good book. You right, without an ink there is no book.
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Exactly! You may not care about how the ink or the chemicals were made nor should you have to assuming someone else has taken the care and time to do this. As we both agree, without ink, there's no book, without numbers, there is no digital image. But you now control a great deal more of the process than before. You create the numbers, you don't create the film stock or the chemicals. Exposing for digital simply means you are aware of your actions when building numbers, just as exposing for the shadows, developing for the highlights (even if the development wasn't something you personally did) played a role in the quality of your image.
Yes, you'd be better off artistically being half a stop under and capturing a killer image than nailing your exposure and shooting something that isn't at all interesting. But you'd be better off exposing properly while making an artistically beautiful image. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. I sometimes find this is a straw man argument from those would prefer to ignore best practices in any field (and I'm NOT talking about you specifically). When someone discusses proper technique, others will dismiss this as not being part of the artistic process. Well it is, to some degree.
So having art enter this particular technical discussion is just a distraction (for those of you who are going into that direction). Let's examine the original question here. Its about proper exposure and the belief that medium format is somehow different from DSLR's in this respect. I don't buy it because of the 1's and Zero's. The math is undeniable.
One can say, I don't care, I prefer the way I'm exposing by not using ETTR. That's cool. But as I've tried to point out to others lurking here, you should fully understand what's going on under the hood and probably, like me, test this yourself. I didn't write a fluff piece about how wonderful ETTR is, it clearly has issues (which I'll add, many but not all could be fixed by the manufacturers).