Analog radio and and video signals like VGA, fail way more gracefully and linearly, which is why they're still used in many applications today where rough environments are involved and high availability is desired as a degraded signal is better than no signal at all due to some CRC or handshake failure.

Digital connections have a terrible failure model, it either works perfectly or not at all, with little in between.

In modern datacenters or in radio broadcasting equipment, you can still find VGA connectors or LCD displays using that signal.

The UK is a bad example, as it adopted DAB (without the "+") far too early. DAB uses the MPEG-1 Audio Layer II "MP2" codec which is a very old codec, and while MP2 actually sounds pretty great at appropriate bitrates (256kb/s or higher), it was decided that quantity was better than quality and so the UK has a large number of poor quality, low bitrate, stations. Sometimes in MONO!

DAB+ uses HE-AACv2 which is much better suited to the bitrates that the UK has chosen to use, and in addition has much better error correction, reducing the "bubbling mud" effect that UK DAB listeners are all to familiar with.

The sad truth is that FM actually works very well, and can have extremely good audio quality, but capitalism must ruin all good things. The death of the BBC, as now seems inevitable, will be the final shame.

Are you implying DAB+ existed when the UK launched DAB in 1995...? Or we should have not launched DAB at all and waited?

DAB+ came out in other countries in the mid 00s and was adopted in the UK in 2016 and now we have over 180 DAB+ stations. But notably missing the BBC.

I'm saying that the UK should have done one of the following:

* Recognized that DAB was not capable enough given the number of stations required, and waited.

or:

* Cut back on the number of stations so that the remaining ones could be broadcast at an acceptable quality.