It’s not that I don’t get the appeal of having larger artwork. But the medium itself in the way it’s used and produced doesn’t make sense. The whole audio production pipeline is digital. Producers take analogue audio, introduce quantisation and digitisation errors immediately to be able to use their fancy computers to produce the music (which introduces even more errors due to all filters being digital) just to then dump that digital piece of sound into an analogue medium at the very end. Nothing is gained except the digital-analogue-conversion happens before creating the medium whereas with CDs you do it after reading from that medium. Which is a stupid idea, as dust and other issues will then mess with the result you’re hearing.
Now, if you’re a producer that actually uses an all-analogue workflow, ignore this, I don’t mean you. You also have my deepest respect for enduring that pain. Please point me towards some records that actually did this though.
Vinyl also has a lot of difficulty with low frequency range, as too much intensity in the low frequency range will cause the needle to skip (momentum of it going up and down on the big sine waves), so it needs to be properly mixed to attenuate the low end. I wonder how many are actually mixed properly for vinyl…and a lot of modern music is intended to have that nice deep low end.
96kHz+ digital is really the way to go nowadays.
Edit: I also just realized if they’re doing an analog workflow to create the vinyl, the EQ won’t be linear phase and will massively distort the sound (particularly the low end) and now you’ve lost what the artist was intending to present.