Yes, there was. When pride was taken by the engineers (sorry guys, I know it still is - but others now can get in the way) all the way from camera to transmitter aerial.
There is some truth in what you say; on the whole, CDs are capable of better quality than analogue, except perhaps in the case of extremely careful setting-up of very expensive record players - certainly, at the cost and convenience levels most people are willing to expend, there's little contest. (Part of this is that when CDs came in digitising was in its infancy, so a very high - and of course uncompressed - sample rate/bit depth was chosen.) Not sure about AM radio - I am not old enough to remember when it was dominant, and allowed somewhat more bandwidth than 4.5 kHz each side. I suspect that, again if carefully set up and with a good signal, it was capable of good sound - but in mono, and only as good as the rest of the reproduction chain at the time, which rarely had much at the top end.
A lot of the trouble with the new is that its proponents tend to _over_state its advantages; I am an engineer myself, and guilty of the same!
I think the big difference with DTV is the initial impression. When someone - especially a non-technical person - sees digital telly for the first time, they most definitely will notice the lack of noise, the rock-steady picture, and the vibrant colours. These of course will be evident on even a frozen picture! I've at least once had the reaction "isn't it a lovely picture" when I was in the middle of setting up and was just getting the odd frame. Especially when viewed close up, a digital picture _does_ look good.
All the things that those of us of a technical mind notice, such as jerky motion, and - especially - compression artefacts, take somewhat longer to be aware of.
(Plus, of course, most [non-technical] people I've discussed it with _are_ interested in getting more channels; not, necessarily, lots of them, but just one or two, that they can't get on analogue. [Remember that this drove UHF takeup to a considerable extent, whatever some may say about the improvement 625 gave over 405, which I personally don't think was that much.] A lot of Kent can't even get C5 at all on analogue, for example.)