I loved 110 because of the form factor. Tiny, pocketable cameras with tiny, pocketable film. The 4x6s that came from the drug store looked like pictures to me, I never enlarged anything beyond that. I had one of the smallest cameras around and took hundreds of pictures with it.
Clearly, not a photography connoisseur, but it met my needs. Especially the later fancy models with the built in strobe flash. (Flash bars and flash cubes kind of didn't work with the form factor.)
Even 35mm was marginal in quality (he says from his spoiled-by-modern-digital-photography future). I went back to film and tried a nice Nikon F3 with a great lens. Photos were okay.
Absolutely wowed though when I started experimenting with 120 (medium format) film cameras.
35mm is great up to an 8x10 print. It'll do 11x14 if you don't stand too close. It's 30mp+ of optical resolution.
The thing to remember is that at the time, nobody was scanning, they were doing optical enlargements directly onto printer paper, with 6-element macro-optimized process lenses. That's a much higher-quality optical path than you get out of almost any scanner - drum scans and high-end CCD scans (flextight or similar) can get there but even midrange CCD film scanners struggle with 35mm and your average flatbed photo scanner doesn't stand a chance.
Nowadays digital has entirely displaced this flow - even at a photo lab you will most likely get prints made from scans. And they're much lower quality than contemporary prints would have been.
If they're B+W, try wet-printing those 35mm negatives sometime. Find a local college darkroom and get someone to walk you through split-printing on variable-contrast paper on one or two of your photos. You'll see.
https://www.guidetofilmphotography.com/split-filter-printing...
https://www.35mmc.com/27/04/2020/split-grade-printing-darkro...
But yeah medium format is incredibly easy to produce usable scans, by comparison. With top-end gear you can get just as much resolution off a MF negative as 35mm - you can do optical enlargement to several feet or even a yard+ on the long edge. But it's way way easier to get something usable for a 8x10 print or something off a MF negative than it is 35mm.
That's crazy. I think I will try a darkroom again. It has been 45 years...
In the ideal case. Shooting 35mm is much more sensitive to higher ISO, missed exposure, incorrect development etc.
Sure perfectly exposed Velvia 50 or Kodachrome 64 developed at a professional lab which really cared about the quality and temperature of their chemicals, has really high resolution. An ISO 400 or 800 film where you missed you exposure slightly and that got developed at a crappy 1 hour photo place, will have pretty mediocre image quality.
With 35mm film, you top out at about ISO 400 in B&W with standard chemistry although you can push things to about 1600 (though it shows). With color slides, the latter ISO 100 E6 films were pretty good. Grain and contrast started getting a lot worse much higher than that. Of course, Velvia 50 and Kodachrome 25 (which had about the same effective speed) were better.
Sure, if you are taking photos of technical drawings or scientific specimens. For artistic purposes, the composition and subject matter much more than resolution. We were regularly blowing up 35mm to 16x20 in photo class, and I've been to photo exhibitions where images such as Steve McCurry's Afghan girl was blown up to five-foot-tall prints.