For artistic purposes the two should coexist. Film is like vinyl records. The sound is better but CDs reign for current consumers and digital has greater flexibility and a kind of durability (though about CDs we don't know). But people are going to MP3, which is a further degraded sound. Nobody cares. Nobody notices.

I switched over to digital cameras three years ago. My film photography had languished for many years for the reasons you cite and also when I gave up doing my own black and white photography in the darkroom due to how much time and money it consumed to do that. Still the hours late at night in the darkroom were some of the greatest times of my life, comparable to making my favorite early chine collé prints or working on collages, encaustics and pastels in my own studio in San Francisco but different, more magical, satisfying a different side of me. The advantage of digital is how many images one can capture and that one can see them right away. On the other hand I find filing and sorting (organizing) and accessing digital photos more of a hassle and simply much less enjoyable because less tactile and physical than dealing with film negative photographic prints.

But digital cameras have been a lot of fun for me and gotten me back to always having a camera in my pocket as was the case when I carried a 35mm Minox in the early Eighties. Now, I sort my digital photos and the best of them turn up on my Flickr Photostream. See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisknipp/

When I thought of going back to darkroom printing some years ago I had a correspondence with the editor of a photography magazine and he told me where I could get all the paper and equipment and chemicals. You can still get them, but they're just from specialized suppliers on a more limited basis.

Digital cameras do not duplicate film cameas. They can do things at night film cameras can't do. But they do not give you good white balance or detail in bright areas and they do not give you realistic or satisfying shadows. None of the inexpensive digital cameras, including the iPhone ones, which, yes, we know is the main camera (alnog with other phone cameras) used to take pictures today, provide image quality comparable to a good film camera. That's funny, isn't it? And nobody cares. Because they like snapping their kitty and putting it on Facebook.

It is needless to point out the advantages of digital for movie-making. I think we have discussed that elsewhere on Filmleaf before. The cameras are more and more portable and more and more inexpensive. You can do longer and longer takes. And so on. And the images don't flicker. It's not a flick show anymore.