Has the affordability of digital photography made photography worse?

I have heard it argued many times that inexpensive cameras and memory cards allows more people into the hobby and are able to take more photos. People who otherwise might not have been able to afford $100s on rolls of film to build their craft. The argument goes that more will somehow equal better, but all I ever see is more mediocre photographs. Could it be that when photography was expensive the people with talent and ability would peruse it regardless of cost, and that cost kept those unable or unwilling to improve out of the craft. I would argue that we have no greater number of "good" photographs taken in a year than we did 50 or 100 years ago, instead digital has flooded us with bad photographs which makes it harder to discover the good ones.