Anybody who has known me for a significant time, and has had significant interactions with me about making photographic images, still or moving, knows that I've often expressed a certain amount of frustration over people who view resolution as a sort of dick-measuring contest.
People are paying a premium for Netflix to stream in 4K, and almost none of those people could look at a 1080p image side by side with a 4K image and tell the difference. Most people are watching content on their mobile devices, which means that it's physically, humanly impossible for them to see a resolution difference. When I was working Imax projection, all of the digital theaters were projected in 2K. People are still surprised to find out that The Walking Dead was shot on 16mm film.
When it comes to still photography, let's be real, most people are never going to see your photo bigger than a laptop screen. The 12 megapixels that you get out of a Sony A7s is more than enough. In fact, having fewer pixels on a larger sensor makes it a better choice in most situations than cameras that put out 60 megapixels.
Still, I've shot primarily on 6x6, medium format film for the last several years. The negatives that my old Mamyia C300 puts out images that are about the size of an Imax frame. It's not like people suddenly wanted to see my pictures blown up bigger. I'm aware of the debates, the tests, and the data comparing the resolving power of medium format film vs digital cameras. Honestly, I don't care much. I don't even care much about the resolution difference between 35mm and medium format. Yeah, medium format will hold up to more abuse in low light. There are a lot of advantages to having larger negatives besides resolution.
Yeah, sheet film will kick the crap out of your digital camera given the right circumstances and getting a good scan. The built-in drawback of large format is that the cameras are big, and heavy -- I'm not gonna be lugging this thing around the city and doing street photography. Still, that's not my style. I like to design everything as much as possible. Having a big camera on a bulky tripod is nothing new to me.
Really, it's not about resolution so much as options.
I love tilt-shift lenses, but I've rarely had access to them. The way a view camera is built, every lens is immediately a tilt shift, plus more options.
Roll film backs are inexpensive, much less expensive than buying a whole new camera system, with lenses. A can shoot medium format on my view camera no problem. Rather than buying a 6x9 camera, I can just get the back; and, I'll have all of the options that the smaller cameras lack.
Namely, is it nice to know that I'm dealing with a medium with such detail that it's not likely I'll ever be asked to blow it up to a size that the medium can't handle? Yeah. That was never among my highest priorities. It's the options that I have, that I've been deprived of creatively, that drove my decision.