I read somewhere or other that there are entire industrial regions now where you can't find a drum scanning service. Without that, Velvia probably isn't much use. On an Epson flatbed scanner you are struggling to get the same quality as a 20MP digital file out of a 6x6 neg.  So the young guy was right: you use what the industry can handle.
There aren't many people out there who would know how to make a flong from hot metal, either. It's called progress.

Well, I wasn't talking about cars - though I do remember that back in the 60s it was quite normal for the radiator to boil halfway up a hill or to need starting with the crank-handle (what happened to those?), whereas my current car has had only one breakdown (recently, due to dirt in the radiator) in nine years. So some credit for improved quality should go to the car makers.

The switch from film to digital is generally regarded as progress, which is why drum scanning services are getting to be as hard to find as crank-handles. There's not much call for either. Or for flongs.

I doubt if anyone except an iStock employee would consider their bizarre keywording and search system and results to have anything to do with progress, as you still need the crank-handle for when it stalls. The prize for progress in search engines must belong to Google.