I've been shooting for over a decade, and I keep noticing that the photos I take with my phone now look better than what I got with my first DSLR. But there's a catch — I'm starting to think that chasing technical perfection has made my actual photography worse. The autofocus, the HDR, the computational sharpening — they all do the work for me, so I've stopped thinking about light, composition, and timing. When I force myself to use a prime lens and manual focus, I miss shots but I also see more. Are we really getting better at photography because our gear is smarter?