I do think you should open your mind a bit. Smart TVs are pretty terrific, I can just cast whatever I want across the room and bam, it's on the TV. Friends can come over and share the input. I can lay in bed with nothing but a remote and browse my plex library.

I used to go along this line of thinking, and had a "dumb" TV for a long time. I would spend hundreds of hours trying to get a PC/xbmc/kodi setup with a remote control to be comfortable, but always required a keyboard and mouse next to the TV. In the end it was a waste of time and I wasn't enjoying my TV as an entertainment device.

When I finish work, I want to sit down and just have everything work. I don't want to have to keep getting up and pressing buttons and messing around to get a myriad of supplemental devices of varying quality to work. I just want one single device, on the wall, with a remote.

Just like 3.5mm headphone jack. No.

I think these days that you don't really pay extra to have an HDMI port on a monitor. As HDMI is signal compatible with DVI, you can just use a passive adapter if your computer only has a DVI output.

I have considered digital inputs (DVI, HDMI or DP) mandatory for any monitor I have purchased for myself since 2010 and when people ask me for advice on monitors I advise the same.

I think with VGA, being analog, the image quality depends on the specific hardware. I've used monitors on 1080p 60Hz using VGA cable and it's been fine. On the other hand, I've also had poor image quality (ghosting) at the same resolution with a different cable and monitor. So it is possible to have decent quality on VGA, but not guaranteed.

> or a system that only supports VGA for some reason

AFAIK, nearly all modern servers only have VGA, serial, network, and a couple of USB ports, so it's much more common than you think. Of course, most of the time you'll be configuring them through the dedicated management network interface, so the VGA and serial outputs are mostly a fallback.