What am I missing?

and 10-12k for a "respectable" digital system is beyond ridiculous, imo.  

Ditto Curtdr.  My seasoned audio friend parted with an integrated amp with an internal DAC to get a pure integrated amp so he needed a DAC.  I suggested the well-reviewed Topping D90SE just for the heck of it, but he bought it and is enthralled with it.  He has a near $20K analogue rig and he finally admits that digital music is "awfully close to the sound from vinyl."  He is wedded to vinyl because of the tactile fiddliness of itl... the exact reason I parted with my SOTA TT several years ago and never looked back.   I had several ~$1K DACs that all sounded okay, but then got an Ayre QB-9 in my system and consequently sold my TT the next week since it sounded so close to analogue.  My Aqua LaVoce S3 is a fair bit better.   

Same as many, I have over a couple thousand vinyl plus hundreds of CDs. Love them all, wil always keep them, they sound great on my vinyl and CD rigs and are pride possessions. However that is going the way of the dinosaurs. Streaming is taking over whether we like it or not. The convenience, the price, the quality and the ever ending multitude of choices make it the clear leader in today's way of enjoying music. And to think I used to be like MC just a couple years ago, analog was king and that was that. Then I grew up, at 68 lol. Thanks to the few folks here who were relentless in talking up streaming. I would never have gone down this musical road without you guys.

Convenience? Streaming Quality streaming? Tidal over Qobuz that sounds a tad forward for me. YMMV and by the numbers probably does.

SACD over CD - But by this stage it’s recording rather than format.

Vinyl who?
My tt has been wrapped up for a year and prob 3/5 yrs. I don’t miss the rice bubbles. Snap crackle and pop.

Business models are out of our reach but not the top artists. Some things have changed. Mostly impact audience rather than studios and marketers.

The use of “cd quality” is used to establish a benchmark. There are way too many formats to list here for music files. Some are terrible compared to cd and some are superior to cd. It all has to do with the bit rate and amount the information is compressed. The lower quality highly compressed uses less bandwidth. That was necessary a few years ago as the bandwidth coming into our homes could not achieve hi res files. CD’s imo are only falling out of favor from the advancement of quality dac’s. A cd player will never have an internal r2r balanced dac in it. Yes they are making transports only but with the quality of streaming who needs it unless as like I do I still have my over 2000 cd’s. I use an old blue Ray player feed into my Gustard R26 dac and they do sound very good.