What's the deal with prime lenses

This last sentence of yours is the crux of the issue, IMO.  I think it can be best summed up as: Limitations enhance creativity.  Maybe this does not work out 100% of the time, but I would be big money that it does work far far more often than not.  Limitations imposed upon the artist generates struggle and through this struggle monumental works of art appear.  Now very few at DPR (myself firmly included) are high level artists, yet the same concept applies.  I see this very clearly in my own images when I shoot film.  Being limited to 16 shots/roll of film dramatically changed the way I shot, and I could clearly see that I was much, much happier with my film work than digital.  Digital is so damn convenient to shoot hundreds of images without much work at all.  Many folks here talk about owning a camera for less than 6 months and having shot off 10,000 images or more.

Some of my favorite musicians were early electronic music artists back in the early '70s when the synthesizer first appeared.  Amazing works of music that took hundreds of hours to produce a 40 minute LP.  The old analogue synths needed hours and hours of tuning because they were very unstable machines.  There was no MIDI so whole new recording techniques needed to be developed.  Enormous challenges that pushed the artists to the limit.

Today, all this music is digital and the same artist produces very ho hum work; work that will easily be forgotten compared to the timeless masterpieces of the early '70s.  Today albums are pounded out 2-3 per year instead of 1 every year.  Quantity over quality, that is the legacy of most digital work.

The challenge was lower so the art suffered.

I love shooting a single prime strictly for the challenge.

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