Maybe I'm dumb but if you ever played an outdoor festival where you are primarily hearing a mic'd tone through the monitors and not the tube amp pissing spls into the wind, having complete control of my direct tone using digital solutions is way more valuable to me than muh toob toan.
Every bit this!
On another sidenote: Add to this that people are constantly claiming latency would be no issue with their analog rigs. But especially on larger outdoor stages, it might even become *more* of an issue with an analog rig.
Scenario #1: You have your amp/cab several meters behind you, no additional monitoring. Not even getting into the fact that sounds coming from behind aren't perceived as directly due to the shape of our ears, but even if it's not all that big of a stage, you may very well end up with, say, anything from 3-5 meters of a distance between you and your amp, resulting in 9-15ms of latency. And as its an outdoor event, there's likely no or very little reflections happening, so there's no audible "clues" to help you get along with that additional latency (one of the biggest differences between real life and digital latency, fwiw). And until now we didn't even factor the latency your digital pedals may add in.
Scenario #2: You have your amp/cab several meters behind you, this time there's additional monitoring, say, through a typical wedge at your place. If you ever have the opportunity, just move around between your cab and the monitor while playing. It's extremely likely (almost for certain), that at some spots you will perceive your sound as out-of-phase-y, even kinda modulating (as you're not a statue, hence moving) and what not.
Scenario #3: You bring your modeling rig kicking in with, say, 4ms of latency and run it through your wedge monitor only. We need to add around another 6ms for any average sized human being. But that's about it. In addition to have less latency, given quality monitors, your sound will likely be a lot closer to what you've dialed in at home or in a rehearsal space - because in neither of these places would you stand 3-5 meters away from your real cab to dial things in, whereas you'd likely monitor yourself through a wedge exactly the same in a rehearsal room and on stage.
Pick your poison. I certainly know what I'm going for. And fwiw, while plenty of folks were like "Nah, your lowly 10" wedge will never be able to supply enough of the goods on a sort of big open air stage!", the opposite is the case as the close monitoring provides a most excellent direct feel. Add to this that no bandmates will complain about that too loud idiot playing guitar. Or FOH folks getting angry about stage bleed.
Win-win on absolutely all accounts.
Outdoor shows require more power and VOLUME (or in ears?) so whatever you are using needs to have that so you can hear what you're doing.
