The FIne Art of Optical Printing

As i was talking to the Gentleman from my local Ciba Chrome lab he mentioned a very valid point.
Hardly any does optical printing anymore... and consequently those skills are disappearing.
I mean you take your film into your local 1 hour shop, it gets developed, scanned and printed. while the results are consistent there is no control or though... all values are evened out for an optimum result . Certainly this works for the mass consumer but sometimes i don't want the image razor sharp, or fully colour corrected etc etc. I really do believe that despite the advent of Digital mass produced consumerism , Black and white will survive not just as an artistic medium but as a way of exercising full control over an image to be able to demonstrate a form of self expression that just is not available with using a computer. A computer generated image is optimal and can be reproduced time and again...quality is only dependent on the the final print process and printers used etc. but by and large this is predictable. A Handmade print is unique as the operator is not perfect and even with following every step to the letter there will be minute variances. Can they be considered faults? well one can argue, but it's these little imperfections that make a print unique and one of a kind, so in light of that no, i would not call them 'imperfections' but rather 'fingerprints', as it were, or simply unique markers.