Dave Van Ess at Cypress Semiconductor likens analog engineers who resist the idea of designing “the crappiest analog you can get away with” and relying on digital algorithms to clean it up to people who worked resisted the transition from mechanical to electronic calculators.
Pushing all design effort to the digital side makes sense for some applications and not others. The question for each application is how crappy are we are comfortable getting away with. It’s nice to have headroom in case signal-to-noise ratio decreases from some unexpected cause. OTOH, spending time designing an analog circuit for low-noise or elegance just for their own sake never made engineering sense even before digital processors became inexpensive.
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