I think there are 3 roles that users expect from digital scope: to act as analog ones did (together with all connected idiosyncrasies), to be digital interactive scope ( an interactive display device but with added functions of digital scope), and a digital sampling unit data acquisition device (capture single shot and analyse).
There are essentially two categories of scopes:
- Entry-level scopes, usually all low BW, with limited functionality and which are designed to replicate the behavior of analog scopes so they can be used by people who were trained on analog scopes; in this class, trigger rate is very important
- More advanced scopes (analysis scopes) where analysis and measurement capabilities are the main focus and the trigger rate is not very relevant unless it's excessively low.
However, thanks to technology becoming better and ever cheaper, we have seen some of the functionality of the second group to become available in the first group.
Naturally no concept will be very good for all three roles..
It's not really a question of which is better in which situation.
Don't forget that, back in the analog days, people mostly had to work around the many limitations of an analog scope, which is reflected in the methodology. But digitization then enabled a new world of ways to analyze signals, and the methodology from back then is simply inadequate for digital scopes.
However, because a large number of people were trained on analog scopes, and many tasks could still be achieved with analog scopes, it made sense to replicate analog methodology on entry-level scopes so obsolete analog scopes could be replaced with a DSO without requiring the user to re-learn methodology.
However, we are now at a point where new engineers have been trained on DSOs exclusively, so there is no "analog memory" worth preserving. But we still drag on analog methodology for the simple reason of "it's always been done this way".
Eventually, however, it will die out.