When viewing B&W photos, we don't get distracted by the colours, we have more focus to - again - whatever is in the image.
Exactly!
I used to play around with self-developing photos back in the days.
We never had that, but I'd have loved to try it out.
You're right about the art of taking quality photos is lost. As you say, we have a bunch of software to help us, but misusing them is also so easy and you get the opposite of what you should.
Another issue I see is the majority of people have no intention of improving. None, whatsoever. I see this in the photo community I'm managing. So many times I'm trying to reason with them, to not post low quality photos and instead of seeing some improvement, what I get is a fight, they trying to convince me that those photos are ok. Life is a learning curve, whatever you do, your goal should be to be better every day, but unfortunately so many are not thinking like that.