little-endian said:
How does that measurement preserve any meaning whatsoever if one defines the noise as being part of the image as well in technical terms (not artistic ones)? In the same way, any higher noise floors of photo cameras could retrospectively redefined as their noise being intended art.

I promise you every DP you would ever talk to would say that both the grain from film stock and the noise from a digital sensor are an intentional part of the look. On a professional non-documentary production, ISO (or gain in post) is picked for aesthetics. If that weren’t the case, cine cameras would have a permanently fixed ISO wherever the dynamic range is maximized.

little-endian said:
Neither am I sure whether I would deprecate film stock as an option for new productions, on the other hand, again from a technical point of view, film is pretty flawed when used for analog information (which virtually always is the case except maybe AC3 and SDDS back in the days for audio) and at least some of the preference towards it shows quite some similarity to the preference for vinyl records which against all audiophile claims aren’t better, but worse than any halfway decent PCM recording.

You are confusing delivery formats and acquisition formats. Vinyl is a delivery format. Film is both a delivery (positive film) and acquisition format (mainly negative film). We are talking about the acquisition format here. Even as record collector myself, I’ll admit that CD/flac replicates the master version of an album more accurately than a vinyl record; of course it does. That doesn’t have anything to do with an artist’s intent. These records you’re referring to were most likely recorded on multitrack tape which is similar to film–any artifacts that arise from recording to this format are absolutely the intent of the sound engineer.