To put it simply: digital photography is very time consuming, if you want to get the most out of your images. The file from your camera is only the starting point on the way to creating the finished product. For one thing, it needs to be properly sharpened since digital camera files are all a little soft.
Since I am a portrait photographer, my workflow is geared to making skin look its best. Just working with huge 12meg Raw files and very huge 150megs or more 16bit Photoshop psd files takes a lot of time and disk space.
Time is money and I spend way too much time working with my digital images, so digital is very expensive in terms of time. Of course the equipment is expensive and has to be replaced more often than film cameras to keep up with the state of the art.
Of course, I would never go back, and will continue to pursue the Holy Grail of the perfect Workflow.
Update August 14, 2014
Things are better all around. Photoshop CC 2014 is faster than ever and has amazing tools. Portraiture plugin has made skin retouching much easier if used with care. However, I still take way to long to retouch a single portrait. It's my perfectionism, but I've learned to not make the image too big on my screen, so I don't waste time on tiny details, and I'm better at saying "Enough. The client will never notice or appreciate all my labor anyway, so why bother."
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