Yesterday I picked up a National Geographic magazine and started looking at the photos. I was amazed page after page at the photography. The colors, the composition. Really excellent but lots of noise. It seemed almost every wildlife photo, tigers, lions, very noisy. So I looked at the cover and it was from May 1992. So this was not digital noise it was film noise or grain. This was before my time. I started with photography using the original Digital Rebel(300D).
By todays standards many the photos would probably be considered not useable because of noise, and this is a full and half page print. I can just imagine what those photos would look like full res on a pc monitor. But the compositions, the color, the lighting were all incredible. I think there was more fine photography in that one issue than I see in a month of browsing online.
Anyway I guess theres not much point to my post except that I think today we are all too concerned with things like noise and pixel peeping and some of the finer points of photography may be getting lost.

I've the National Geographic Greatest Photos compilation ("Through the Lens"), and as you say its about the content not the medium.

Properly drum scanned film reproduces just fine. Back then and today. The problem, more than likely, is something that plagued so many drum scans of that era, and that was the oversharpened scans that were the order of the day then. One of the most popular scanners back then was the Hell 3010 and later the 3300, and the default sharpening was extremely harsh, to say the least. Of course, you have no idea if some of those images were were cropped, and a lot of the wildlife imagery was undoubtedly shot on Fuji or Kodak ISO 400 35mm film.

If you're even in Bishop, Ca. you owe it to yourself to see Galen Rowell's Mountain Light Gallery, where all the print up to 32 x 48 are from 35mm slides.