When and how did you, if at all, realize vinyl is better?

This is a little like debating over whether the weather is nicer in Arizona or San Diego.  Depends on what you prefer and what the weather was like when you were there.  

That said, I do love the sound of vinyl.  I find that the best go-to LPs please/impress more consistently than the vast majority of my 2-channel digital recordings.  Now, some of the digital 5.1 stuff is a different experience, albeit the availability of source material is limited.  

But I think the quality of digital can be a lot closer to analog than many people have experienced here.  It's best to take the data off the spinning disk and play through an appropriately optimized computer or quasi-computer system.  This optimization can be very intense trial and error, and involves a ton of both hardware and software variables.  

So while many listen to digital through very high end gear, you can do a lot better by being an under the hood PC guy.  Then you have to get compulsive about finding the best digital source material - re-buying CDs with better mastering and sometimes even remixing from what was available in the 80s and 90s, and of course hunting down genuine and legitimate hi res versions that are not just upsampled or poorly mastered.  

Add the effort and you will be rewarded with digital.  It's there.  Not saying that the sound alone is superior, but you can get to the point where which is better is on a recording by recording basis rather than format vs. format.  

Then if you add the convenience factor, digital has a legitimate reason to be in your audio lives, without sacrificing quality for the most part.  

I may take you up on that!  

Digital takes a long time to get really right.  I don't agree that the sound is homogenous.  I did not find it reliably good until I built a custom computer with low power and no moving parts, and a dedicated audio-grade SoTA USB card (with separate power supply), added a Wyred4Sound DAC2 and got the ASIO drivers working correctly and made a number of other important software tweaks, and then sought out the best digital release for each title - sometimes that is HDTracks, sometimes that is CD, and sometimes something else.  There are many nuances, like using Exact Audio Copy, to get right in order to max the sound quality.  

I know getting analog right is also a process, but the point is, you cannot compare the two unless you have spent equivalent effort (and had equivalent success) optimizing each.