Rob C.,
It seems that your point is that advances in automation (focus, exposure level setting, film advance) and operating speed are irrelevant to you, and then, yes, maybe not a lot has changed except the replacement of chemical emulsions by electronic sensors.
But if all such technological innovations of the last fourty years or so are irrelevant to you, I think it just means that you and the 21st century do not have much to say to each other. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
You are on the money. And my point is, to drive it further, that most of these 'innovations' don't really make better pictures. Pictures are basically about the mind, and because somebody likes to let the machine change focus, change exposure etc. for him doesn't make his work any the more superior at all. We had motor drives decades ago - they failed to make better shots, because all they did was allow chance a greater say and chance is notoriously unikely to co-operate with the lazy or inept. (However, they did encourage higher film sales.)
Someone mentioned the pelicle system of viewfinder - it didn't last and was seen as a novelty, period.
Gimmicks sell cameras; they don't usually create the conditions for better images. As far as I can see, digital capture has only created an entirely new camera industry at the expense of a hell of a lot of other established companies, jobs and the value of money invested in equipment itself. However, I am more than willing to admit that digital home printing has opened the door to a lot of more user-friendly opportunities for print making. Having written that, I have not seen any great number of prints that's been any more worth the making digitally than via the old ways. Do it with a brush, a trowel, a stick or a spoon or even through a lens - unless the image has something intrinsically worthwhile to state, it matters not at all that (or how) it is created.
And that's the basic, bottom l¡ne that digital has never been able to disguise.
Rob C