I don't have Mr. Lohmann's professional pedigree in photography, but I have been printing photographs since the 1950s, so I remember the gelatin/fibre based days very well - indeed still have the prints. (Old time hypo and clearing agent really did a good preservation job in those days). And I remember well the quality of the gallery prints that the traditional giants of photography produced with those papers.
Yet I have two problems with this article: (1) it focuses on Black and White images, whereas these new papers are probably being formulated primarily for colour because that is the predominant use they will have, and (2) it raises an unexplored fundamental question about whether the standard of quality should depend on what we had before, or on some other objective reality.
Admitting that these papers should be equally suitable for B&W, based on the best B&W digital printing I've seen on exhibit, I'm far from convinced that in the right hands today's best inkjet prints are so inferior to the best of yester-year. This is based on what I subjectively and intuitively perceive in terms of dynamic range, quality of black, sharpness, quality of tonal gradation, etc. - the one-second intuitive reaction to what's real and what's fake that Mr. Lohmann so knowingly describes here.
Turning to colour, I've made some colour prints on Innova FibaPrint Gloss Type F and unless I'm fooling myself I believe they are high quality products per se. They don't shine (because of the surface, whether we want to call it naugahyde or not), they have great dynamic range (good shadow detail) and the luminance of the colour is outstanding. I just look at them in their own right for what they are - and by the way, I selected the images I used for testing this paper very deliberately, because another factor about using papers (unstated in this article) is that different papers are better suited to different images.
Progress being what it is, we shouldn't doubt that in the future we'll have yet better papers compared with what we have now, but I just find myself a bit less apocalyptic about the present range of choices now on the market. If that means my taste in photographic paper is under-educated, so be it (but then again perhaps it may not be.......hmmm).