Would vinyl even be invented today?

Abucktwoeighty, I went to Wikipedia and it said basically what you said about Rube Goldberg. I always thought that Rube Goldberg was a fictitious name. I never knew it was actually a person. Thanks for the heads up.

Is taking an analog signal, converting it into a bunch of 1's and 0's that can only exist in cyperspace, and then reassemble the digital bits in an attempt to restore the analog signal as close to the original as possible, so we can then use it to listen to music, any more plausible?

Has no one listened to any music that has been produced since '87? Somewhere it has gone digital in its chain before it hit your ears. A record off of those digital masters sounds "better" to many than listening to the original digital hi-res version. Why?
All analog is fun and does have a unique experience, but it would never be invented today. It is expensive and has many incredible flaws.

I think many people enjoy the sound of a record is partially because of the high noise floor, where digital can sometimes sound just a little to antiseptic.
If you have the opportunity, listen to a great pair of speakers in an anechoic chamber. Awful. Absolutely awful, but probably closer to perfect. Humans use all the background noises around us to give us a sense of space. Analog's noise duplicates that space, digital does not have it.
It is a feeling thing, but not a sound reproduction thing.

@dentdog_a terabyte? Got a link you can share on that? Would love to read up on that.

Tubehead, I'll look around for it. It was Feickert or one of his buddies. Bottom line was that it would probably take north of 300-400 gigs before double blind testing vs a Terabyte would yield the difference undetectable. I still think it may be like being able to do time travel-only you lose your soul.

If someone woke today in a non vinyl world and dreamed it up today, they would certainly say "yeah, but there's no decent new music to record on it." Then rollover and go back to sleep.