I've often wondered if some lost arts represent niche opportunities. My username is apt. I'm keenly interested in analog, particularly precision and low noise circuits. I have a side business that makes a niche market product based on an analog circuit.
At my day job, I'm one of the few people left who is capable (or maybe just willing) to compute a formal noise budget for an analog circuit. At least in the instrumentation business, there will always be a need to get the analog signal from the sensor to the analog-to-digital converter with dignity. And understanding analog issues is sometimes vital to resolving those issues using digital processing.
Indeed. Well, perhaps it is a bit of a lost art in the sense that an EE curriculum nowadays has to sacrifice so much deemed fundamental perhaps a few decades ago in order to squeeze in all the digital stuff... I for one am glad I still had subjects on transmission lines, basics of FEM modeling of electric fields, impedance matching, low power analogue electronics and a whole pile of signal analysis/processing stuff even though I wasn't in the RF stream.
