You could take your stance about digging in crates looking for an assortment of sounds and turn the tables on it. Something like this:

Nowadays...people don't want to spend the time and training it takes to engineer really good sounds. We used to spend hours designing a proper recording room....building it....installing sound insolation....experimenting with different drum sets and microphones....painstakingly eq'ing, compressing/limiting.....then perfecting the actual performance. Now you just got some kid who's gonna sift through old records and just take those sounds we spent so much time on and use them for their own work. But they will never really have their 'own sound' because they're not building from the bottom up.

I certainly wouldn't advocate a position like this...but you have to admit it uses the exact same logic that you are.