Mmmmmmmmmh, so many interesting points of view here...
If I recall any configuration my sound passed through in the last 30 years, I see that I mainly experimented many different solutions to find MY sound/tones.
Was I maybe 100% aware of this? No, of course.
I started playing guitar at the age of 12...I had my first electric guitar at 16 (a serious guitar, indeed...the 1998 Strat Plus I still own...), after I removed 6 strings from my amplified 12 strings acoustic to learn "Running free" power chords (my poor fingers...) fron Live after Death vinyl LP and booklet (yes....I was used to look at how and where guitar players put their fingers and Adrian Smith was my personal Guitar Hero).
I then bought a 15 watt solid state small Squier amp and an Arion distortion pedal: at that time, to me it was an awesome sound (I wasn't aware about clean sounds yet...
)
After some times I started feeling the need of something more and I bought a Fender Deluxe '85 solid state amp.
No stomps at all, just amp clean and distorted sounds and some reverb.
Believe it or not, with that guitar and that amp I played a lot of stuff from classic rock to blackest, brutal and powerful thrash/death metal (seriously) for years.
Then I/we discovered rack units (it was year 1990) and sold the Fender amp for a 8080 Valvestate combo to have a Marshall sound (I used an ART SGE Mach II and then a Zoom 9030 connected to that amp).
I started messing with that stuff as many other friends and we did not have any f**king internet to waste time on and so we were focused on learning, playing and finding good tones by programming those rack tubes preamps and digital effects units.
It was not difficult: it was FUNNY!
Additional MIDI options and noise gates opened our minds to useful new solutions that allowed us to throw stomps and pedals out of the window and forget about tip-tap dancing and uncontrollable noise.
We simply were HAPPY...and we loved to have more and more of that stuff in our racks.
A good rack controlled by MIDI boards, a good 4x12 cab, bridge humbuckers and a Floyd Rose: f*ck the Blues!
Guitar heroes, shred and heavy tones everywhere.
I still love Queensryche and their guitar wizardry and tones.
Many years passed...things changed...I sold my rack and cab and bought a Line 6 Flextone II 2x12 combo with a Floorboard.
It looked like perfection....and it was not.
I attempted for a lot of time to get some good tones with some dynamics from that thing...and then I gave up.
I also found that I don't like SIMULATIONS: I prefer to break my head with real stuff.
I sold the amp and bought a Mesa Caliber 50+ combo...a blast of an amp, but you cannot use it alone at home...unless you do not want to try to be arrested.
I discovered that stomp boxes have had some improvements...and I spent the next years buying and selling stomps to find a good combination.
It took a lot of time...until today.
I found a good stomps combination (you can see the stomps I'm currently using somewhere in the Depot), with all the guitar tones I need and like...and I use that stuff when I play with my band, since I can easily bring my guitar sounds/effects/tones on the studio and connect to any amp I find there.
It works.
Then I started messing with racks again...and I've to say you have so many more possibilities that, if I were forced to choose, I would throw stomps out of the window again.
There's a lot of old stuff that still breaks the ass to modern, digital stuff...if you know how to use it.
You've not to make it complicated to find good tones: a good tubes preamp, some basic digital effects, a good power amp and a stereo cab.
And MIDI, of course.
What I discovered, at the end, is that I finally found MY sounds/tone and it doesn't matter if I use the racks or the stomp boxes...it doesn't matter the amp I connect my stuff too...and it doesn't matter the guitar and pickups I use: MY sound is there all the time (something MJMP verified with my MP-1 patches: the EQ shape I use there is the same I use with any preamp, stomp or amp I use...the secret is MIDRANGE...and usage of your EARS...^^).
This is a result that is of utmost importance to me.
I see a lot of people here in Italy buying and selling guitars, stomps, amps...then going from all analog and fuzzy to digital perfection.....buying Axe Fx or Kemper units....then selling everything to go for an amp and stomps again, because it's too difficult....and so on, on an infinite loop.
Having no idea of what they want to achieve at all: it's just a game of buying and selling to spend some time (and lot of money).
Useless.
I do not want to mean that I spend all of my time in consciously researching something, but there's always something that works on that direction anyway.
Having so said, probably Harley is right and the market is made of some pros and many, many, many others that only have some money to spend.
On this market, if you want to sell something, you've to understand what people would buy.
No way.
This is what makes a place like this and the people who makes it alive something still MAGIC.