Some personally compelling reasons for myself as a guitarist:
1) With physical gear, I own the means of sound production. Less so for pedals that integrate closed computing elements into their circuits though, and even less if it has IOT crap (why??). Analog devices are generally best at this aspect.
2) Along those lines, longevity and repairability. Again this applies most strongly to analog pedals. I can keep using a well-designed pedal for decades, and keep it going with occasional repairs and maintenance. Digital modelers (including digital pedals to an extent), not so much, for a number of reasons.
3) In general, physical signal chain elements, particularly analog ones, strike me as more malleable as an end-user. I can do tweak the gain of individual stages, rework the inter-stage EQ and attenuation, etc. with a physical tube amp, and do similar things with analog pedals. Perhaps to a lesser extent with digital pedals too. I'm not aware of a modeling system with comparable flexibility, though I'd be interested in being proven wrong.
4) Some analog stuff, to my limited knowledge, is still difficult to model.
Why is this an issue? When was the last time you had digital electronics fail, and it wasn't a victim of the early 2000s capacitor plague (in which case, replacing the affected caps fixed it)? "Repairability" is vastly overrated: most electronics don't fail in the first place, and when they do, it's almost always electrolytic caps, and this affects both digital and analog circuits. There's nothing "unrepairable" about a digital circuit: it's not like a logic gate on your CPU is likely to fail.
>and even less if it has IOT crap (why??).
If you're referring to amps (like Fender Mustang series) that use your phone for the UI, that should be pretty obvious: the phone is an ubiquitous device that you can assume the customer owns, and provides a large touchscreen for controlling the amp remotely. It's not IOT; it's a Bluetooth connection. It's not necessary for using the amp, it's just an option, and a really helpful one when playing with effects settings, and much easier to use than the tiny LCD screen on the amp plus its jog wheel. Once the settings are done, you can assign settings to footpedal buttons and never mess with it again. With the 7-button footpedal, for instance, you can easily set it up with 5 different sound profiles you can easily switch between, with the other buttons you can switch between "banks" of 5 effects if you need more for one song/gig.
