CD's will never go away as the industry is aware that many have had 30 years to accumulate collections. The idea of a music server or hard drive crashing is an unpleasant thought. At worst, I will have to download and then burn to a CD.
For my car I have been toying with the idea of those flash drives with their own dac to keep it simple.
Jim
Jim, don't let that fear hold you back. Just remember that it's not a matter of if, but when – disk drives will fail. Redundancy is critical. After a year of ripping, I'm approaching the 2,000 CD mark, which is about a terabyte (as .wav files). Believe me; I don't want to go through that again. I rip to a disk in my PC, then transfer the data to a NAS (with mirrored drives) and both of my USB drives (1TB is only $100, and USB 3.0 is damn fast). One USB drive is attached to my BDP-1 and the other is at the office. It would take a cataclysmic event for me to lose all of that data, in which case, that would be the least of my worries.
I've also purchased a few albums from HDTracks. That, most likely, is the future. If physical media doesn't disappear completely, it will certainly become marginalized (and unfavorably priced). Once you get a proper music server going, you'll understand why. I don't bother with CDs in the cars either – either use an iPod or a USB thumbdrive (most modern head units support either/both).
I'm with Quiet Earth. I don't understand why there has to be a conflict between vinyl and digital. Neither is perfect, but I enjoy both. CD players have come a long way since I purchased the first two, but I still fell instantly in love with the technology. So much so, that I bought two of the things. I actually ordered the unit pictured below before the Philips, but it took over a month to get it. A friend of mine who owned an audio shop in Munich rang me to tell me that he had a few CD100s in stock, so that was actually the second one I purchased, but it was the first one I got. I was an overpaid government contractor at the time.

I replaced the CDP101 with a CDP501 about a year later. I wish I had kept it too. It would be neat to still have the first two models made. I'm amazed that the Philips player still works (but I really didn't use it long).