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Miles --
I don't mean to imply that digital photography is intrinsically "superior" to silver photography, but it's on the ascendency and silver is clearly in decline. Too few people are buying silver materials and that impels the manufacturers to restrict their output of films and papers to a few basic types in a limited range of sizes, while raising prices. It will probably be possible to obtain some silver materials for a while—perhaps a long while—and there will be a determined bunch of hard-core silver advocates who will claim that silver images are fundamentally better. But this analog-vs-digital battle has been fought and lost before.
For one example, phonograph turntables and pickups are no longer plentiful in the stores, and production of vinyl LPs has essentially ceased. This is not because LPs are necessarily inferior to CDs—hi-fi purists insist that vinyl records (played through Class A tube amplifiers, of course) actually sound better. But a few purists can't support an industry, and the majority of music consumers now seem to agree that CDs (and iPods) sound plenty good enough.
The issue, seems to me, is not how an image is produced, technically, but whether (a) making the image was a gratifying labor of love for the photographer; (b) whether the image is an honest product of the chosen medium (not a photograph tricked up to look like a painting, for example); and (c) whether the photographer has employed technical knowledge and skill as effectively as possible to enhance and refine the image concept.
From this point of view the choice between silver and digital seems irrelevant. Both media are capable of beautiful, expressive image quality but they require somewhat different knowledge and skill. Seems to me it's important to determine first what your chosen medium can and cannot do gracefully; then learn how to exploit those characteristics to make it produce the image qualities you want.
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