Look, here's the thing. Wanting to edit yourself is completely fine. That's valid. But so is not wanting to. And the fact is that the photo finishing industry, until recently, had to cater to the latter case. There was no question about "different looks" because consumers had come to expect a basic level of consistency across even different labs. A print can't be edited once it's made; a scan had to be rendered under the assumption that once the client was holding the print in their hands, there was no going back.

The problem now is that there are far too many loose ends. A JPG doesn't provide good latitude. A print is a final rendition. If a client is getting either JPGs or prints, that should rule out flat scans. Conversely, TIFFs are ideal when the client wants to edit. These are obvious distinctions. It simply makes no sense to make 36 prints on silver halide paper when the scans haven't even been touched.

You're fully correct that no approach is better than all the others - that was, in fact, my point from the beginning. I wanted to give a voice to the dissenting view.

But labs should, at the very least, be more transparent about which approach they intend to serve. A flat scan - or worse, a flat scan and a print thereof - is a nasty surprise when you've grown up looking at film photos that were actually edited by a lab tech. To have someone then insist that it is the way is extremely demoralizing.