I've attended a lot of photo meets, and if I had a dollar for every shooter who showed up with the latest and greatest gear, only to post poorly composed, poorly lit, overprocessed dreck weeks later...
I think a better analogy is bicycles. You can have the fanciest, lightest racing bike in the world, but if you're not a trained athlete it's not going to help you much. If you are a trained athlete, you can crush nearly any amateur with a $150 bike from Walmart. All other things being equal, gear matters. It's rare that all the other things are equal, though.
Fancy cameras on phones are awesome, but what I really wish they'd give us is the ability to control off-camera lighting.
Getting out with friends meant having to go back home after the first jump (usually less than a kilometer away) because the chain derailed, the brake will block and so many horror histories.
When I went to the bikes workshop to fix it,just looking at the weak frame they refused telling me that if they did fix it, it will break again and be responsible. So I had to fix it myself. In practice it meant replacing the entire bicycle part by part.
I bought an expensive bicycle later that never derailed or blocked or anything in its entire life using it every day.
Sometimes expensive gear can save you an enormous amount of time.
Obviously, if a camera is defective and it prevents you from making shots you may want a more costly, reliable camera that will not fail on you when you need it.
But I can assume that at some point, when you add to the cost of a bike, you no longer buy reliability. You may even reduce reliability as components are getting lighter and more frail and difficult to replace/repair.
All else being equal, I like reading books printed on good paper. But good paper will not make the story interesting and the story will still be interesting even if printed on crap paper.
Of course, if you are an author you would like to make the experience pleasurable for your reader.
BUT.
If you are obsessing with the quality of the paper that you will use to print your book to the point that it detracts you from your work, before the story is even written yet, before you even learned to write interesting stories, you are completely misplacing your focus.
Depending on the kind of work you do you may not need to obsess over your tools and that obsession may actually hinder your creativity, when a base level of “fine” would do.
But that doesn't mean tools don't matter. They very much do, at everything that can be called craftsmanship.
- Sharpen/noise reduction: If you want to avoid over-denoising and over-sharpening you need RAW, there's no way around it. I find Apple's rendering (and most other phone makers) distasteful. Anything above ISO 800 is just trash on JPG but pretty good on RAW. It's the reason I left my Canon G10 and later S100 on the drawer years ago when the iPhone started shooting RAW.
- Dynamic range (latitude, for old folks like me). If you want detail on the sky and on the shadow under the rock on a sunny day, you need RAW. Also, no other way around it. Magic-AI-Smart-Auto-HDR+ can sometimes help but it's comical at most others. Distributing the tones is part of the creative process.
>Camera gear and RAW are just tools and will not make your pictures better
Oh yes, they will. That camera doesn't matter motto never dies, it seems. Tools are extremely important. They don't work on their own, of course, but are definitively part of the equation.
Since we're on HN, a good analogy would be that because all computers are Turing Complete, they are all equivalent and you shouldn't worry with specs, OS, languages, editors, compilers, etc.
While one can make an interesting sports event shot with a pin-hole you can't use it to freeze someone in mid-air, etc, etc. I think you get the point :)