Has digital made things boring?

Good points!
I feel that a lot of criticism of Photoshop (and other photo manipulators) is simply that folks do not understand nor want to learn a new craft. After all, they have spent years learning their craft.

+Mark Forman : agreed. But the 1890 Box Brownie made things 'cookie cutter' too… every shot was circular. Even more like it'd come out of a cookie-cutter Smartphones, because they provide an end-to-end solution [camera to publishing mechanism in your hand] have meant a lot more people are basically doing, globally, what a lot of people used to do by having slide-shows of their boring holiday snaps at home.

+Wray Post I think that's part of it. I learned on wet-film from 1974 and went fully digital in 2007. There are lots of challenges but I would like to think I am embracing them and allowing my exploration of them to fruitfully change my work.

+Eric Seaholm That would have been the Twitter version of my article

I agree that digital and photoshop haven't dumbed things down. If you are used to working in the darkroom it's amazing the flexibility that digital gives you to create what you have envisioned.

As far as magazines, they've had decades to see what people like, what works and what doesn't. A lot like ads, it doesn't surprise me to see that they've moved to be more similar to each other. 

It's easy to forget that along with Photoshop came the age of internet. That's have a much more immense impact on photography, in many different ways.

It's allowed users to share techniques across the globe in seconds. There were probably more localized groups in the past. You can always explain and pass on techniques, but now you can show the exact settings you use, or just share presets. In the darkroom they is always some variation to how people do a technique. With software being so easy to distribute, you probably find more people using exactly the same tools(software) compared to the darkroom, also making it easier to duplicate techniques.

Sharing your work across the world has also made it easier to copy people. Discussion about photos and art was probably more in depth for those people that liked in the past. Now in the internet age a lot of it is driven by page views, "likes" and comments. Photos that generate that type of response has definitely increased.

The internet to has also changed how we view photos. Whereas galleries, portfolios, books used to be the main way to see photographs, the internet has moved it back to one photo at a time. Most photographers on the net probably don't think about putting together a set of photos anymore. Even if they do, it's often constantly evolving. It's also hard to enforce the viewer looking at your photos in a particular order. I think the singular nature of viewing photos on the net means you people tend to experiment in styles a lot more rather than developing a technique of their own. Viewing their photos together you can often see how the post processing style varies a lot.

Certainly these things aren't true of all photographers.

Lastly, the digital age has just made photography a lot more accessible to people, so you find a lot of casual photographers who have ways to push their photos out too a lot of people. There are more amazing photographers now then probably ever before, but you have to dig to find them.

The internet has brought a lot of good too, but it's definitely a mixed bag of the bad with the good. You can't just blame Adobe.

Charcoal? I thought blood was the medium of choice!