But a lot of people who self-identify as being serious about photography will stigmatize you for the gear you're using.

Indeed. What usually happens is that trends develop for photos that can only be taken using expensive gear. So for example, when I was a kid and everyone was shooting "full frame", no-one gave too much of a toss about background blur -- beyond the obvious fact that some (easily achievable) degree of it is often useful for softening distracting backgrounds. Now people obsess over paper thin DoF because it's a sign of expensive gear. I suspect it will go out of fashion again in a few years, once smartphones perfect computational blurring.

>> I was a kid and everyone was shooting "full frame"

Ok, this is a little vague, because are you referring to digital or analog?

When I was a kid, everyone was shooting full frame, because, well 35mm was the de-facto standard for film. Although my first camera was a 110 format camera, which is a hair smaller than a 4/3 sensor today.

I meant 35mm film.

And it was still looked down on by the medium and large format photographers!

35mm film already affords you the very maximum in light gathering and blur, though. The kit lens used to be 50 1.8 or 1.4, which really is pretty much the amount of background blur people are looking for today. You didn't complain about lack of aperture or blur because you already had what people today are looking for.

Even medium format and large format had pretty much the same amount of background blur and low-light performance, just at a higher resolution.

Yes, but the point is that people rarely if ever used that level of background blur, as it wasn't trendy to, e.g., take portraits where only one eyelash is in focus.

Really? Because even really old portraits had huge amounts of background blur: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/aU4oh69TPgC0JrujNVvk... for example.

Now of course, it wasn't trendy to take portraits with only one eyelash in focus, but the vast majority of people even on FF don't do that. On my 50 1.4 (a lens made for film cameras, btw) if you want to take a picture with such an extreme amount of blur you need to have your subject quite close to you. And there is virtually no one with a lens faster than f/1.4 nowadays.

People today shoot and chimp, which was impossible back in the day. If you wanted a preview, you needed to have a polaroid around.

Film and processing cost money, and took from an hour or to days to get back, so people would set the aperture in a more reasonable range.

Ah, ok, I wasn't sure if you were and oldster like me or a youngling who grew up in the digital FF era.

Yes, and anything less expensive is “a toy”.

Meanwhile, my teenage daughter is over here taking - IMO - close-to-professional quality photographs using an Olympus E-PL2 and the kit lens, available all day long for $100. It’s all in the mind of the artist.

Amateur photographers can be almost as bad as watch snobs, and with little more purpose.

Sounds like web development.

Just like audiophiles, I can guarantee they're not professionals.

That attitude shows up in any domain where one can feel like they belong in the top tier of "knowledge".

You could just as well be talking about preferences in operating systems, barbecue sauce, coffee, diets or web frameworks.

Yeah, just hop on over to DPReview's forums or Reddit's r/photography sub and read some of the threads.