A protest to the tune of approximately $1 per photo. I love my 35mm SLR but shooting on it is extremely cost prohibitive. Digital photography doesn’t have to be inhumane, it’s more about the user than the technology.
You’d think I’d burn hundreds on film but no. A roll might last days or weeks or even longer. Every shot is different. I spend more time framing and making sure the exposure is correct. It forces you to slow down and think. The cost becomes hardly a thing because if I start worrying about $25 a month if that on film and dev, I have bigger problems.
You answered your own question — because you'd "give [yourself] a headache of 4000 photos with dozens of near identical shots to sift through".
It isn't the dollar-cost; it is the attention-cost.
When I shoot digital I might take forty shots of the same subject because there's movement and fractional differences in subject distance will visibly miss focus, so 10 fps.
When I shoot digital I might take one shot because exposure correct for highlights can be post-processed, so frame and focus.
Slides/print film and processing did not used to be cost-prohibitive. But I shot a few rolls of 35mm on my old SLR a few years ago and was stunned at the costs to just have them processed and scanned to digital files.
I used to do my own (B&W) processing as a kid and paid for it with paper route and lawn-mowing money; I don't know what that costs these days but it sure seems that film photography is no longer a reasonably cheap hobby.
Unless there was some time sensitive event, I might not look at them for weeks. Then I'll discard nine in ten.