To paraphrase Joe McNally..
“The camera’s not a camera, really. It’s an open door we need to walk through. It’s up to us to keep moving our feet.”
To dredge up frommy own photogarphic upbringing, the walls we see as obstacles to success or moving forward are really artifices that exist in our own minds.
Step aside from the maelstrom and observe what is going on and for goodness sake stop being dependant on the default settings and think like the guy up the mountain with the 10 x 8 camera and a few plateholders. Think the picture through, twiddle some of these dials and settings and who knows what may result.

However, be that as it may, we all have access to similar tools (albeit somewhat limited by the amount we want to spend on clever cameras, software etc. ) yet some people still manage to create astounding works with surprisingly simple equipment. After all, centuries ago everyone with a bit of money had access to the same paints, paper, canvas etc. as Da Vinci, Van Gogh, yet only the gifted ones produced lasting works of art. Doc is also right though that a knowledge of the history of art/photography is important to enable one to work creatively with those basic tools.

To quote Ian Drury & the Blockheads…. “There ain’t half been some clever bastards”
Lucky bleeders ! Lucky bleeders !

However I would have to disagree with you that the final image does not have a history to the viewer when it’s on the gallery wall. In fact I would go as far as to say that part of the issue with the sameness in much photography that has been pointed out here is partly, or perhaps even greatly, due to those photographers lack of knowledge of the history of photography. The history a photograph takes to the gallery wall is the history carried by the photographer, and nothing better arms a photographer to achieve exceptional or out of the ordinary photographs than an understanding of the great photographs and the philosophies of their makers over the history of the medium.

You are also right when you say “This can be either by the digital technologically engineered way or by the silver gelatin way” and don’t forget the hybrid of both!

But It is the philosophical not the technical that creates great images, and as the numbers of images grow and ways to view them increase this becomes exponentially greater.

The final image doesn not have a history to the viewer in the gallery, it only has a presence.

Considering that so much of what is now the history of photography (and therefore has influenced many new ideas in the medium) has come about as a result of a mistake, either technical time or chemical, is there a chance that photography will homogenize without analogues vagueness and randomness?
Consider Man Ray (or more precisely Lee Miller) and solarization, an accepted accident that had a huge influence on photography, and still does to this day, is there potential in the digital age for such discoveries? Working with film I still make discoveries this way that influence my work, however I would never have the time or inclination to search in the infinate world of photoshop for these interventions.

I think digital photography has, to use your terminology, left home already and is happily on it’s journey. Digitography’s greatest feats and developments wont in my mind be realized until the now young digitographers who have known nothing else grow up (artistically speaking) with minds free of the influences of analogue ways, and take the new medium to places we can barely imagine now. Analogue photography will never die but will perhaps be further separated from digitography and then referred to much the way analogue photographers refer to painting and other mediums.

You ask “Are we overly influenced by the community in which we find ourselves? Does a group mentality emerge, a collective aesthetic which influences our own creativity, which imposes a series of mores upon it” I think there is clearly a collective aesthetic that has influense for both analogue and digital practitioners, just analogue has a long history to fall back on, the digital collective is still small which would account for the sameness you refer to, as it as yet has very few pure models to work from.

“And, if we choose to chart our own path, do we excommunicate ourselves from those groups” only if we choose to!
At this point one can happily stand with one foot in each camp, but over time the gap will possibly become too great to do so.