The thing is, there's nothing remotely comparable to the emulsions they killed. They were really head and shoulders above the crowd.
K25 and RG25 were grainless razor-sharp emulsions. You could make huge prints and have the quality rival 4x5 quality. Literally!
What happened as best as I can tell is that the beancounters took over and said gee, we're not making our target revenues from those lines, so dump 'em. That would be like Chevrolet dropping the Corvette, or Dodge dropping the Viper.
They killed their flagship products, they cut their pro lines off at the knees, and they're trying to go toe-to-toe with the "cost-cutter" off-brand stuff for the point-and-shoot crowd. Instead of playing up the quality of those legendary emulsions, they pared down their consumer lines, rebadged 'em with stupid teenybopper names like "Max Zoom!" and put bright shiny colors (doubtless tested on lab monkeys) on the boxes.
My freezer is full, I'm still trying to round up some 120 RG25 (and some more 35mm if I can) at reasonable prices. They're all way outdated, but I found a roll that had been bouncing around in two attics over ten years and ran it through my old Retina 2a for giggles, and it came back looking like it was fresh off the shelf. The slow films have staggering keeping qualities. (Films age due to heat and cosmic rays, and the faster the emulsion, the more susceptible it is to the latter.)
I could keep on ranting (and probably will later on :)) but I need to sit back and de-aggravate my blood pressure now... Ugh!
I am grieved by this as well, and share your pain. I also lament the loss of glass lenses and metal camara bodies. Plastic lenses do not appear to accept gold flashings. New cameras surely don't look as sharp through the viewfinder as the older ones. My fairly well equiped darkroom may become inoperable due to losses like this. Actually, this marks the beginning of the end of a pure art form.
Its extremely sad, really.