I remember reading astronomy magazines in the 1970s which often included amateur photos. The amateur photos I see today are far more impressive! I can only assume it’s the equipment.
Well I take credit for building the mount the scope sits on, staying up all night, adjusting the tracking for the scope to be near perfect or close, fighting for critical focus, and learning imaging techniques in regards to obtaining the raws, darks, and flat images, and then processing the data once the images are obtained...lol
But other than that, your absolutely correct.
The new digital cameras...DSLR and CCD cameras are fabulous for astronomical imaging, dramatically cutting down on tracking times, exposures times etc....But then again it opens up a entire set of new factors, like techniques in processing the images and data, which is an extensive complex combination of science and art...I have much to learn here...lol...
The processing side of it is like the new photo lab or modern "dark room" so to speak, which I really enjoy.
All the images I take, I will never over-process, and what you see in the image, is basically what the telescope saw...All I do is attempt to bring out, or squeeze out the existing data in the image. I really enjoy the image processing part, but I need to add, there are a lot of people out there that do much better work than I do.