Thanks for that link! Great reality check, isn’t it…
Yeah, that guy is a goldmine, and very skilled at that. (Reply To Inquiries …)
@blj try the Kodachrome-like preset in darktable color balance if you are into that look (of course it has nothing to do with a real Kodachrome recipe, it’s only in the same earthy spirit for midtones shadows with cold highlights).
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Oh, I just love this guy… 
What I find the most interesting is how he seems to work with custom command line tools to implement his visions. This allows him to go against the normalcies of current software. I would not even know where to begin to do something like that. I can program all be it extremely rusty and all the math is way beyond me. But kudos to him he is a really interesting guy. Reading this stuff is enjoyable.
My favorite tools are command-line. exiftool, dcamprof, img (I wrote that one… 
), sometimes g’mic, a bit of imagemagick just recently to build an animated GIF, gnuplot, although I get the impression that it has morphed in unwieldy ways since its inception.
A well-written command-line tool will give you a degree of control you just can’t get in a ‘boilerplate’ GUI program. Although the rawproc GUI’s (I wrote that one too) fundamental organization is based on experience with dcraw and g’mic, a toolchain you build from scratch, and re-order as you see fit.
Not only flexibility, but there’s learning to be had in stitching together operations, to either joy or sadness. There are insights to be had when things don’t work as well as when they do…
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I agree always liked scripting/building stuff like that. Spent a lot of time modding games and doing microcontroller firmware stuff for fun. Can learn a lot from 8bit micro assembly programming. However imaging seem much harder to find information on.
Regarding motivation, the only thing I can offer is that if I have a camera with film in it I have tremendous excitement when setting up a shot that is totally non existant with a digital camera. It’s what turns me on and why I mostly shoot film. Sure, I shoot digital, but film is where I get my enjoyment. And nothing beats the buzz out of getting the Velvia back from the processing lab, or taking my 6x7 B&W negs out of the developing tank. You can’t do that with digital.
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Actually, I get a lot of excitement when I set up a nice shot with my digital camera. It’s a real buzz downloading the images off my camera and seeing them bloom to life in my raw editor. Or you have guys like @ggbutcher building their own development tank, but instead of mixing chemicals in the tank, they are mixing together algorithms and lines of code in their IDE. In some ways developing your images digitally is more technically challenging that working with film, but also in some ways it is easier. Either way, photography is a lot of fun! 
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Oh, how I remember the old days with my Nikon FA, AIs lenses, and Kodachrome 25 film! And the waits to get the processed slides back from Kodak. Every time was like Christmas morning.
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Oh, what a metaphor. Note that in those terms, I’m just an apothecarist, not a chemist; I can mix things, but I really don’t know what they’re doing
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thank you for sharing those amazing film photos.
i am a film lover myself, and when i first started to shoot digital, i was always dissatisfied with the colours i got.
i was suffering in post for hours, to get something that pleases my eye.
then i found the blog and the book of the russian photographer - pavel kosenko - his book ‘the live digit’ tells about his background, experience in getting the best results with digital, and why does he think, understands, why we, humans tend to like some film photos more.
the author of the book later got disappointed in digital himself, and started to shoot exclusively film, and… his iphone.
for that he created a macos program which applies the luts he have had prepared by shooting film and colour targets, then printing film with analog way, and creating luts out of this.
i don’t use macs so i am out of the game. my friend tried to reverse engineer his luts, with some success, but his luts still have problems.
so i shoot a lot of film, and i decided to try creating my luts. today i got the camera colour target from wolf faust.
i already made a couple of photos under different light, and i will try making good luts. i explored internet but did not find something close to the quality of kosenko’s dehancer program, and i did not find something i will really like. i only found something i can tolerate sometimes.
so i hope my luts will be better.
still, i love to shoot film, and will unlikely to give it up.
my suggestion will be: shoot film. get a film camera you can use your modern lenses with. or get a film camera with old lens that have their own taste.
and shoot film, and enjoy it.
i would not say that you don’t ever need a post with film, but i usually avoid it, and enjoy what i have. i don’t have so much time for post, and i think what i get with film out of scanner is good enough for me. well i do scans myself and i have some problems with my scanner but i think i figured it out now.
when i was getting lab scans from the pakon or noritsu scanners - i was amazed by results and i did not want, usually, to touch the scans at all.
once i gave the lab a weird cinema film to scan, and the scans had green shifts, so i created a gimp script to batch process and degreen all the photos i got in that batch. that helped.
but usually i am happy with what i get from the good lab scanners.
if i want to get photos that are over or under exposed - i do it when shooting, so i don’t need to postprocess because of that.
Yea I have been looking into various Canon 35mm film cameras. I do want to get one at some point at least then I can use my macro lens on it. Thought about a 6x6 as well. I want these for black and white shooting though not to replace my Digital Canon 90D. I am still experimenting to get the results I want. I am making more progress to what I like in post by following a build up process and specifically targeting and adjusting specific tonal regions. It helps keep the images from getting over pushed causing banding and such.