SSB I don't fancy because I don't stand a chance with my little 15W squeak and as you mention it's tick box contacts only.
I only operate CW myself but the point is more that a lot of people don't want to fish out £1000+ for a transceiver and all the crap you have to have to operate digital modes on. The minimal subset of hardware has perhaps £40 of parts in it. There's a hole in the market for a black box you can connect to a bit of wire and throw it up in a tree and plug your laptop into it and operate at a couple of watts out.
Hans Summers is doing something similar but it's a whole radio. All we need to care about for digital modes is a relatively narrow band SDR using simple downconversion into I-Q signals and ADC hooked up to a USB bus. Outbound is similarly simple (I-Q modulation) and can be driven from the host machine trivially. Only complex bit which no one ever seems to solve other than expensive outfits like Elecraft, is an automatic tuner for end-feds and multi-band LPF
Yeah I dont see myself spending 1000£ + for a ham radio. That would be a blackbox with lot of buttons bells and whistles. I feel they are toys rather than radio. And you cannot repair modern radios with pcbs and SDT parts easy, if not impossible. Something doesn't work with these modern radios, they have to be thrown out, because to repair anything, it starts from about 300£ just to see what is wrong with it, and then you add labour and parts, then that money can buy a brand new radio and more. So, why go that path?
I like simple radios, just for CW and SSB, and if it breaks or dies, then something that I could work, replace the parts and bring back to life -these radios I like. My HF rig was a second hand about 40 year old, and got it for about £200. I thought that was too expensive for a hobby thing.
I got another a couple of hf radios for 50-60£ because they don't work. I got them for repair project.
I suppose everyone has different minds and prospects on the hobby. I like buying cheap broken radios or gear, and open it up, fiddle about with it, replace the parts and trying to repair them. Sometimes it works, sometimes doesn't But that is where my fun lies.