A long time ago I ordered a sort of novelty lens (inexpensive, but still, not that cheap!) from Amazon and was not pleased when it arrived in one of those bubble envelopes, the box within free to slip, slide and bounce all over the place. Ehhhhh!!!! Thankfully the lens was OK, to my relief, but I quickly made sure to check it out thoroughly in case I needed to return it.
With that in mind I gave the situation a lot of thought before once again taking a risk and trying Amazon to order the little fisheye lens....and decided, what the heck, it wasn't expensive, it wasn't as though I were ordering a lens which cost a couple of thousand dollars.... so placed the order and was pleasantly surprised when it arrived nicely and safely packaged in a box containing the actual box which held the lens itself. So that was good.... Whew!
Even so, most of the lenses which I have purchased for my cameras have been either from local shops or from B&H online and (thankfully!) I have never had any issues with them. Ditto with purchasing accessories such as extra OEM batteries or various-capacity memory cards -- first option is the local shop, and after that, B&H.
If I were someone who made huge and expensive purchases of lenses and camera bodies all at once, adding up well into the thou$$$$ands of dollars range, Amazon simply would not be my vendor of choice. I suspect that many other photographers feel much the same way.
Ditto for computer equipment. If I need or want a new Apple computer or some accessory, again my first choice is always going to be the local Apple Store, and I am fortunate to live in an area where we have several of them within comfortable local driving distance. Also, obviously, ordering from the Apple Store online is an option as well. Why would anyone go to Amazon for an Apple computer or other device?
I don't think that it would be possible for Amazon to keep DPR as a repository site. It still costs a fair amount of money to have a website and hosting service and to keep on top of things to be sure that the site is still functioning as expected. Amazon probably doesn't want to mess with that at all, they just want to dump the site and clear their books of it and move on. Frustrating and sad, though, isn't it, for the actual target audience of active photographers who truly benefitted from using both the current and the historical information on that site?
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