Hi Jono!
I am so with you on this. As you know I had an S2 last year for a couple months and shot a lot of frames but eventually returned it because of a series of problems with both bodies and glass. With the money I got back I upgraded my P45+ to a 65+ and my Phamy body to the latest version, adding a nice leaf shutter portrait lens. The setup produces images of amazing quality once you've learned how to use it, and never more so when the back is used on a tech camera with decent glass.
However.... I don't use it very much. My work this last year has fallen into a rhythm of selling fine art prints at much higher prices than I used to, and to a much more educated kind of buyer, and not one of them has ever asked me the slightest hint of a technical question further than 'how do you get them to look so painterly?' (answer: it's the way I print 'em!) - but not one question, ever, about cameras, formats, lenses, whatever.
My new home has a nice long corridor that I have put gallery lighting in, and I treated myself to hanging a set of my six favourite (and mostly best selling) shots, beautifully framed. They are printed to a tad larger than 21 x 14 because of nothing other than that that is how they look right. It's not a size that would test most cameras, especially when printed on the paper I use, which is a little dreamy and romantic. But nonetheless, of those six shots, one was from a 5D mk 1, two from a 5d mk2, two from Leica M and one from a Ricoh GRDII. And three were on zoom lenses, which I claim to dislike.
Were I to drill down further into my collection and print my favourite 50 pictures, the ratio would shift radically in favour of the M8 and M9 but I'd be hard pushed to be sure that any MF shots would creep in. Maybe two or three.
I could expand tediously and for many hours on why this is but in short, the shots that are the most beautiful and intriguing are the ones where something amazing happened between the light and the landscape and I happened to have a camera there. One rarely just 'happens to have' a MF camera there and indeed, when I look through all the amazingly high quality MF landscape work out there, most of it technically well beyond my abilities I'm sure, the great bulk of it lacks that one quality that I personally value. I used to want to capture that perfect shot of a slot canyon or an autumnal maple at maximum resolution. Now I don't. Things have changed. Those are other people's shots, and they have been done endlessly and beautifully in ways that demonstrate the virtuosity of other people's vision and other people's gear. But they are not my shots.
I don't sell the MF gear because there is stuff I want to do for which I will probably need it. As you know, everything I sell is for charity so I can please myself what, where and how I shoot and I very rarely do client work. If I did, my drivers would be different. But as it is, you and I shoot in quite similar ways I think, and I am now relaxed enough not only to repeat the bromide that the 'the best camera is the one you have with you' but finally to believe it. Just like you.
I just don't care any more. I want the shot at that moment of happy union of light and landscape and that happens when it happens, not when I have loaded a car or backpack with the best gear.
There are a million better photographers than me who have very specific client needs to meet and they know what gear best meets those needs just like I know what gear meets mine.
Lastly: I think extreme resolution is often used as a clear distinguishing mark of the real pro. Cityscapes of Asian boomtowns that print ten feet wide but would frankly look extremely dull if taken on a smaller sensor and printed 20 x 30. That sort of thing. The fascination is in the size and the detail, not really in the vision itself. At a recent charity auction in which I had a print, some enormous prints by some truly enormous names failed to sell because, IMHO, though they were big they were also a bit barren. The trick hadn't worked on the punters, who had failed to fall for the 'size=degree of professional credibility' equation. They bought what they wanted, which was pictures that were beautiful or funny or inspiring or shocking or memorable and it really didn't matter who had taken them or on what gear. And a lot of these punters were high profile, highly educated collectors.
So like I say, I just don't care any more. Everything else being equal, I would love for every shot I take to be at 80mp and exhibit technical perfection. But whenever I kit myself out in order to achieve that, nothing happens, and I am not prepared to take a Phase system with me when I take the dog for a walk...
Keep the cash.
Best as ever,
Tim