Then just change what you consider art. Fiddling with lenses isn't art, is it?
Fiddling with brushes isn't art either. But it certainly can be part of the process.
I think today a professional is someone who runs an influential fashion blog out of her smartphone. Or a successful presidential campaign consisting of nothing but offensive tweets. The new professionals never learned how to use DSLRs, yet their photos are the most influential. Photography is just a means to an end. If you get to the right end, who cares about DSLRs, right?
I'm not talking about the all generic "professional". I'm talking about a photographer where photography is their profession. Their method to make money. These are the folks like Ansel Adams who create artistic work. Freelancers doing work for media, both online and off. Folks adding to the stock photography collections so that marketing firms have something to work with. People whom you pay for professionally made family photos and special occasions (a niche, but still there after all these years).
These other professionals
are professionals, but they still aren't the ones propping up the DSLR market. Especially if they rely on stock photography (which is going to be done via DSLR).
And for your last two sentences:
1) No, it isn't just a means to an end for the hobbyist / pro. And if you feel that it is, that's okay, but you totally are not the market for these things.
2) "The right end" is subjective, and there are certain "right ends" that you cannot achieve with a smartphone camera in any current smartphone (the physics of it are literally impossible), no matter how much someone insists that you can.
Because it doesn't have the full capability of a smartphone. Pinch to Zoom (digital not optical zoom), Tap to Focus and other smartphone gestures have radically changed the way to handle photos. From a smartphone photographers point of view P&S and DSLR are both the same old dumbcameras.
I've touched the Canon EOS DSLRs of my father and used them more or less like a P&S in Auto Focus mode only. But I never saw one of the photos I made, the complicated menu and little screen was too much for me. I rather prefer making photos on my big Retina iPad, where I can edit them right away.
Emphasis mine. This comes out as someone who really should have been introduced to something other than a DSLR. I was introduced to photography with an old Kodak Instamatic. On that, I learned the real basics about composition, lighting, etc. It wasn't until I took a class that I used an SLR (in an era when DSLRs were just on the rise, because SLRs were super cheap for the school). Fully manual. That's where I learned about aperture, shutter speed, and focus control. I'm still learning on some of the more interesting stuff that you can do with fine control over depth of field (which
cannot be done with a smartphone camera of today), shutter speed, and lens-mounted filters. There's a lot there to learn and develop. Anyone can take photographs, but not everyone is a good photographer. The difference is skill (and sometimes, knowing when a hammer can't turn a screw).
And to be honest, one of the reasons why DSLRs are so complicated is because a model basically has to be used for a whole host of situations. Sports photography, Landscape, Portrait, Astro, etc, etc all have different needs from the camera. I don't actually use a DSLR's full set of features, I mostly have it configured for the sorts of photography I do, and that's it. Makes things easier when I'm out with the camera so I do little to no fiddling. A portrait photographer would
hate having to use my camera.
Just a note, most of those "new professionals" you cite, are using DSLRs for their blogs, Twitter and Youtube videos.
Oh yes. And it's partly why DSLRs and mirrorless have been pushing video more in the last half-decade. When you can buy pro-level gear that will do really good 1080p recording for short work, in the 1000$ USD range, things change a lot. And it is actually a market DSLRs are in that they weren't really usable for even a decade ago. They are eating into the low end professional video market. Totally forgot about that.
