Concerning photography, I got the impression that the selection is wider than it used to be. I do not see which category of enthusiast is being neglected, even though I'm the first one to complain re Df not being further developed, but let us be reasonable.
In ancient times we had film in a few formats, and all cameras, from simple ones to pro level, had the same basic features and controls... main differences were fastest speed, flash sync speed, the possibility to add a motor, and the exchangeable ground glass. Compare with now (we are getting too much, maybe). We lost the exchangeable ground glass for reasons not very clear to me - does really everybody rely on AF ? do Zeiss lenses not exist ? this seems paradoxical to me: one the one hand, Zeiss does good business, on the other hand, cameras are ill-adapted.
Other features were tailored to slide shooting : I'm thinking of the multispot measure on the Canon T90, one of my favourite features at the time. I was mostly shooting slides under difficult conditions (organs in churches => high contrast). In the absence of slides, one is better served with a histogram, and even that is not really useful given the current DR of sensors.
Generally speaking, the current selection is rich, too rich maybe, and even most picky users like Mr. Erlewine manage to find satisfactory cameras for doing things unimaginable 30 years ago.
Concening mp3, that's not my favourite format, but it is misrepresented by Jonathan Sterne. Fact is, the masking effect exists in humans, and mp3 uses it (and over-uses it, at times) to perform the data compression. Besides, to some, it is more the pre-processing (e.g. cutoff at 15kHz with all the phase shift effects) that may be problematic. mp4 / AAC does basically the same, only better. It is not a marketing trick, but an engineering one.