I think that your question is too vague and that you are asking a question that isn't hard to answer, but isn't asked the right way.

If you are asking - what good is digital, in my opinion the reason for digital is only because public service went digital and the only reason why public service radio is going digital is because they ran out of bandwidth and they would like to simulcast voice and internet - 2 times the amount of bandwidth or more into the same allotted space as their analog allotments.

Why would ham radio want to go digital when we have all kinds of bandwidth that no one uses? I think a lot of it has to do with technology so advanced that it sells more - new radios. There is such a small percentage of people buying actual ham radios today that the manufacturers needs gimmicks to keep the flow of radios and technology going.

On the UHF / VHF side of things, the capture ratio is much better for digital vs analog, but analog has the ability to communicate in places where digital will not penetrate. In public service radio, when the ability to talk further is produced, the first thing they do is turn down the transmit power.

Anyone that has worked Part 90 radio will tell you that when the transmitters were tube, even if the load was not a true 50 ohm load, even if the antenna fell down, the tube equipment would either keep going or it would blow the tube and it wasn't hard to fix. With solid state, when something happens, the equipment fails and it is very costly to repair or replace.

On the amateur radio side of things, the people licensed today as amateurs are stupid compared to those licensed 50 years ago when an applicant had to draw circuits and had to know the difference between different types of tubes and had to have an electrical background just to pass the test.

Today, you get 10 points just for spelling your name right on the application.
We give amateur radio licenses to 5 year old kids with no knowledge of electricity.

If we deploy stupid amateurs that can't do anything - once their smart phones quits working, we have to supply them with radios that can do simple tasks such as giving GPS coordinates and sending simple text messages.
This is basically what the Yaesu System Fusion equipment does and D-Star - which is practically worthless, allows the users to link up digital repeaters - VOIP. Which doesn't really teach the users anything about real ham radio.
Unless it is my antenna talking to your antenna, you might as well use Skype or a telephone...

On the HF side of things, the only benefits I can see to using digital modes is that it allows you to send blocks of text and it allows you to work weak signals - below the signal noise floor that we can perceive.
It is great for working moon bounce and other things like that..

That is another thing that degraded amateur radio, because you don't need to know CW to operate digital modes. What happens when the computer fails or there is a problem with the program? The people trying to use the digital modes cannot communicate with each other. While CW might be antiquated, it works! Or problem is the CB'rs that we now license to occupy our bands so we don't loose our bandwidth doesn't know how to operate CW and doesn't want to learn and is too stupid to learn it on their own.

So the only alternative is to give them something that they can use that they don't have to learn how to do anything other then press some keys on a computer keyboard.

So in my opinion, the architect of this program was very ingenious to come up with modes to allow people to communicate with each other digitally that prolongs our hobby at least for a little while. It doesn't make the people smarter, but it does reduce the idle chatter and the lack of identification that I have observed on the phone bands elsewhere.

You don't normally see rag chewing on the digital portion of the bands.