I am not quite that age but notice a similar phenomenon, and have indulged slightly in it myself. My gut feeling is the motivation relates to how computing evol

I am not quite that age but notice a similar phenomenon, and have indulged slightly in it myself. My gut feeling is the motivation relates to how computing evolved, particularly in the 80s and 90s. Essentially people used to feel that their inability to perform a given task was gated by their lack of access to a certain sort of machine, such as a UNIX workstation or LISP machine. Now we all have surplus computing power and cheap peripherals the sense is that we must be missing some essence that was lost since these machines, because that is the nicer explanation than that given access to tools far better than those in previous generations most of us have no idea what to do with them, or worse that we allow ourselves to be distracted entirely. The musical equipment world is just like this too.