All technology has constraints, and pictures are made within them. Dynamic range may or may not be an advantage, because there are only so many levels that can be reproduced for the viewer. RGB, for example, only gives you 256 shades of grey. It might mean more options for the photographer, in that you end up with more information in the highlights and shadows, but ultimately the decision to compress one or the other needs to be made if making a black-and-white print (for example) and you end up with the same picture.

if you have more stops of light available you can get a picture closer to what the eye actually sees. You can see the difference between a crop camera and medium format camera right now if you take a landscape with the sun in the frame, and that is only a few extra stops of light (recall that EVs are logarithmic so each stop is 2x the light). Most cellphone cameras have a native dynamic range that is just over 1/2 that of a crop sensor camera. If the crop sensor cameras used the same tricks as your cellphone, they would be able to do very impressive HDR in-camera.

It’s all true, but the point I was making is that photography isn’t just a technical pursuit nor are those tricks and abilities the things that everyone looks for. There’s more to photos than simply reproduction. None of these things has really shifted the overall quality of photography in the last 100 years as much as it has shifted the way photos are made. And that second shift is pretty much done.

I really disagree! The shift from film to digital allowed photographers to remove the price per photo aspect of photography from the equation, but only recently has the dynamic range, resolution, etc of digital matched properly developed film. Now, digital actually surpasses it. People are generally able to practice photography without going broke, which is an amazing development.

The Revenant would have been impossible to shoot even 10 years ago, the demands on the sensor or film would have been too great. This means the story couldn't be told at all! So the technology actually enables people to take photos that would have been otherwise impossible.

I'm also suspicious that the second shift is "done". I suspect the technology will always be pushed further at the high end of the camera technology market which will trickle down. Similarly, I suspect the software innovations used by Google / Apple will trickle down into the software of dedicated cameras, which will further widen the quality gap between the formats.

Quality isn't all about reproduction, it is also about creative possibilities. Right now, none of the smartphones can take a photo of a moving subject in low light. They depend on averaging frames which leads to subject blur. This isn't a minor detail, it's the difference between a photo and no photo.