Honest question: if you're a musician, what is the appeal of digital modeling? Is it purely affordability/accessibility, or are you drawn to it because it would create different sonic possibilities that you couldn't get from the original?
And yeah the sonic possibilities are endless. On a physical pedalboard, it's pretty involved to rewire everything to change the routing, or add/remove pedals, etc. With the digital modeling ones, this all becomes trivial and you can try all kinds of different setups much more quickly, save them and go back later, share them with friends, etc.
All that said, it's kind of like asking an acoustic guitarist in the 1950s why they would use an electric guitar. Electric guitars obviously have lots of advantages, but it's not like people stopped playing acoustic guitars. I still think real analog pedals are cool, they're fun to collect, in some cases they sound better, etc. And sometimes you don't need the mega-flexibility -- if you have a 4-pedal setup that does "your tone" maybe that's all you ever need.
But as an engineer I just nerd out over all of it. Analog. Digital. If it makes good music it’s all cool to me.
That's my primary motivation. On my AxeFx, I have signal chains that are impossible with real gear. If I want to tweak that chain, it is a couple clicks of a mouse. I have four expression controllers and 10 foot switches that are tied to different parameters. I can tweak this functionality on the fly. All in a single $2k box.
Beyond all, tube amps are stupid for bedroom players as they generally require gig level volume to get the killer tonez...
I have had modeler amps in the past, but every so often I'd just nerd away with the dozens of available amp models and the myriads of settings, and come out with the dissatisfied feeling of having just wasted a lot of time instead of engaging with music.
I find modelers have their place when it comes to replacing a set of analogue pedals, which is the reason I traded my three Boss pedals (compression, reverb, delay) for a Boss GT-1000Core. Overkill for my purpose, as I really never use any amp sims, cab sims, of any of the advanced signal chain stuff that the device is capable of. I just have one patch with my three pedals for practice, going into the AC4, occasionally turning the same knobs as on the analogue versions, but enjoying that I now have built-in a tuner as well :-)
you can run the produced models in browsers, on mobile, on embedded hardware such as in this case and even on calculators (joking)