Yeah, see -
Here's a shot I took with a Nikon F5 on Ilford FP4+ through a Red filter in 2001.
Now here's a shot I took with an EOS5D and flipped to high-contrast B&W in Lightroom in 2009.
Other than the resolution, they're syntactically identical. It's just easier for me to take B&W these days than it was 10 years ago. Now here's another. This is a ruin in Peru taken by my mother in 1966:
This is a ruin in New mexico taken by me in 2011:
Color cast may be due to altitude; the New Mexico ruin is at 9,000 feet while the Peruvian one is at 14 or so. But other than that, once you crunch the resolutions down to something similar, it's the same photo. So I guess I grew up with photographers, and our photos weren't shitty, so "shitty photos" weren't nostalgic, they were bad.