alt Hacker NewsI don't disagree with you. I just have an equal wish to state my equally valid piece on the matter :
The majority of the world's guitar players - or hobbyists if you prefer - don't play in bands (yet, or maybe ever), and it's likely - given urban realities - that most don't have regular access to a space where amplifiers can be meaningfully used. After all, you don't buy an amplifier to run it at 2.
For a lot of those people, guitar playing has a different meaning than the rock-band meme of "Fender/Gibson/Ibanez/... & Marshall/Peavey/Mesa/Fender/..., jamming penta-blues on stage with the boys" that's persisted as the carbon-copy expected setup since before The Beatles and Hendrix. That's ok. Nothing wrong with either.
And the economics of real amplifiers aren't kind to guitar players. We all have a friend whose biggest lifetime purchases consist of a long line of Holy Grail Amplifiers, the amp to end all amps, sooooo much better than all the rest... once every 4 years for the past 40.
Let alone ones from poorer economies.
And both the reactivity and tone of modelers is so good now that even trained ears can have trouble distinguishing between them. In the vast majority of cases it's not a downgrade from a real amp.
Here in India we have a little explosion of youtube-trained bedroom guitarists with outstanding chops, playing live to small but dedicated audiences. Almost none of them would have been able to afford a "proper" gig amp and cab, let alone a place to practice with them.