I don't know. In theory, film has jitter, generation loss, undesirable grain (at least it was undesirable until someone developed a way to avoid/get rid of it) and is locked (almost exclusively) at 24 hz/fps. And if you do an average amount of post processing- anything you shot on film is scanned... and then if you project from film, it's printed back to film from the digital.

Digital should never have vertical tearing or motion blur (more than film) like you said. I tend to think you might have been on a witchhunt or talking yourself into seeing things that weren't there. But I'll concede that it's possible that the equipment was crap, not properly configured, performing some odd pulldown, or other unfavourable whatevers.

Over the past 10 years, as digital has improved drastically (and film hasn't), I see film apologists ditching all of the logical or 'fact' based arguments and sticking with more esoteric "it feels warmer, looks more natural" kind of arguments that can never be vetted fully... it just comes down to opinion at that point in time.

And then there's this odd thing. The limitations of film are what we associate with film. You get rid of those limitations, and everything starts looking like telenovela. I think in a couple of years, these associations will weaken and the peoples (that's us) will be less affected by high fps or deep focus, etc. Today we see those things and think "day time television". Tomorrow we'll just see the film. Really clearly.