[nyrikki]

Negatives are smaller than you typically want the final images to be, with contact printing you positive images would be the same size as the negative.

Printing for end user consumption almost always involved enlargement.

The cost, inconvenience, and increased light of large format cameras with silver based films made them unpopular too despite the reduction in quality.

Similar to the quality vs convenience tradeoff that results in people using cell phones as cameras.