As I read through this stuff, I cannot help but be reminded of the predicament of Ayn Rand's Howard Roark. You can either adhere to the restrictions imposed by others, or you can push the boundaries. Put another way, you could design McDonald's franchises or you could design houses like Frank Lloyd Wright's "Falling Waters."
Ahhhhh
Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, said it best, methinks. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

And everyone of the "true photographers" post processed! Just take a look at the most famous of Ansel Adams various prints. Every one of them has been "post processed" numerous times. Ansel dodged and burned, and burn and dodged his negatives numerous times in the darkroom over the years. There is essentially no difference between a darkroom and Photoshop. The main difference is that Photoshop, just like the digital cameras we now use, is just more sophisticated than the darkroom.

I don't agree that computer programs (PP) are more sophisticated than the darkroom. The chemical soup that develops the film is dependant on many things. Time,temp, type are all v ariable is is film. Asa as stated or pushed and how many stops? What brand of enlarger. Which EL lens at what stop. Dodging burning cropping, framing, etc. I haven't even started on printing. Anyone who has spent hours in the darkroom knows it is extremely sophisticated. There are things that you can do in the darkroom that can't be done with a computer. In digital you press the shutter and you have the image. In film you press the shutter and you don't have the image. All you have is the latent image on the film. you don't have the image(Negative) untill the film is processed. With digital PP is totally voluntary. You can print that image with no processing whatsoever. Film on the other hand MUST be processed, it's not voluntary at all.

There is, amongst subscribers of this forum, an apparently endless debate as to what true photography really is. Some belong to GIRITC crowd - i.e., "Get it right in the camera." These folk decry any form of post-processing, saying that an image altered in any way after the fact is not a true representation of the photographed scene at the instant of capture. True enough, although some GIRITC shooters will engage in PRE-processing, as in, changing the camera's settings (other than exposure, shutter speed, iso and flash) BEFORE capturing the shot. Which is, again, not a true representation of the photographed scene at the instant of capture. Others insist on shooting only jpegs, saying THAT format yields a true representation of the photographed scene at the instant of capture, because no settings are changed by the shooter prior to capture, AH, but the CAMERA, in capturing a jpeg image, is using its built-in software to decide how the image should appear. So the camera alters the images w/o input from the shooter, SO, one more time, this is not an altogether true representation of the photographed scene at the instant of capture.

Of course, this argument may be worth pursuing if one is intent on rendering an image as close as possible to the scene being photographed as it existed at the moment of capture. Such shooters are sometimes referred to as "purists" and in other situations as "photo-journalists." Now if that's the way one wishes to approach the craft of photography, well, that's fine. BUT, one person's snapshot is another person's news image is another person's Facebook/Twitter/Instagram shot.

But what if the shooter decides this isn't the way to go? What if the shooter wants to create an image that's not just what the camera sees, but what the shooter sees. Ah. The IPTMFAICI crowd. (I'll process the, um, image after I capture it.) This is when one moves into the area of, um, ART. Which, as an independent photographer, I have every right to do. You don't care for the approach? Fine. You go your way, and I'll go my way ... and I'll get to Loch Lorman aforrrree yeeee... (Sorry. Couldn't resist.). Ah, but I've run across an article which explains this concept quite clearly. And here 'tis, laddie.

http://photographylife.com/what-is-fine-art-photography#more-138580