A very good ENGINEERING explanation of why analog can not be as good as digital..

Its not just a question of Vinyl vs. Digital.
Spend big money and effort on a problem and you will likely find success.
Music is emotional and so are audiophiles. This will affect the judgment of the comparison.
There are great differences between recordings, analog and digital. Many recordings on both formats leave much to be desired. Much more emphasis should be placed on recording technology. Quality of every part in the recordong studio, and mike placement etc plays a big role in the outcome. It is hard to fix a recording after it is done. 
Redbook 16/44.1 is a standard that is very old, but acceptable to the great unwashed masses who are OK with mp3 and AM broadcast, and who thinks rap and techno is music.
SACD and DVDAudio is easily better than the old Redbook format but they failed commercially for the above reasons.
It would not cost much more to make than Redbook recordings. 
Recording studios use higher resolution equipment and resample it down to Redbook standard. Bad. The masters likely sound better.
192KHz 32bit is easy today, and the distribution on discs is obsolete.
We need better source material, more life like and more natural sounding.
Higher sampling rates and bit resolution should be a snap with today's technology.
Copyrights will block the progress to better sound redistribution. 
With good base technology reproduction should not be that hard nor super expensive. 
Spending $120,000 to listen to truncated 16 bit audio just does not make sense.

You’re correct, I spent $6K on my CD player and $28K on my analog set-up. I won’t spend more than $20K on CD playback but I will spend up to $40K or $50K for LP playback.

Until you’ve heard my system or my friends systems who have near SOTA CD playback, you haven’t heard great CD sound, only inferior CD sound. My cable manufacturer friend and I hated CDs until the mid-2000s when the equipment improved sufficiently to make us realize how good it can sound. I am not part of an unwashed mass who accepts crap sound. I am also a part time recording/transfer engineer and have friends who are world reknown mastering engineers. Too bad you haven’t enjoyed the pleasures of fine CD playback (or maybe what you’re listening to was poorly mastered).

Analog recording attempts to reproduce faithfully the original sound, and if done properly, you can get it.

Digital recording attempts to reproduce approximately the original sound. By using a large number of bits you can get as close as a one million of a percent difference, but never the exact thing.

So, the correct statement is: digital reproduction can be as close as one wants to the original sound, so small the difference that indeed it could not be detected by ear, but it is never an exact replica.

So, digital recording and reproduction can be as good as analog, but NEVER better.

Exhibit A - digitally remastered cassettes. The best of both worlds? High dynamic range and low noise without all the digitalis produced by the digital playback system. The digitally remastered cassette demonstrates that it’s not (rpt not) necessarily the digital medium per se that’s the problem, but the CD playback system. Tape is a natural medium. It breathes.

Well, I really liked recording to DCC because it sounded so much better than CDs.  I think it is a lot closer to analog sound than most digital solid state device recordings (computer, recording devices).  My own DCC recordings sounded similar to my Tandberg RR recordings at 7 1/2 ips.