I'm a layman on this topic, so I'm definitely about to say something wrong. But I recall an intriguing idea about a sort of "reversion to analog," whereby we use the full range of voltage crossing a resistor. Instead of cutting it in half to produce binary (high voltage is 1, low voltage is 0), we could treat the voltage as a scalar weight within a network of resistors.

Has anyone else heard of this idea or have any insight on it?