As always with these sort of debates poeple tend to put their own experience and needs onto the recomendations they make.

So you are right, people objecting to hard drives do miss those pointshard drives are suitable for some purposes but not for others. Similarly those suggesting film based storage have their own reasons and it is right in some situations, for example, when reliablilty is the most important thing, but less good at other purposes, when it needs to be shared with many other users.

Similarly with the debate on the best format to save the pictures, There is only one right answer - it depends. It depends on
o Do you want to edit the contents?
o Where will it be viewed?
o and by who?
o What is the quality fo the original?
o Must the sound remain in tight sync.
o .....

You get the idea. there are lioads more of those questions.

Similarly for a wrapper format - This should be separated out from the question about the best compression for the pictures and sound - of course you may not need to wrap the video and sound and other information all together, but increasingly nowadays you do. In that case MXF is a good choice as a wrapper format, not the only one and not suitable for some purposes. (Another member says MXF is a metadata format, not exactly wrong, MXF wraps many different things together, including metadata) In MXF metadata is encoded in a way known as KLV (Key Length Value), standardised by the film and televison industry.

So the debate goes on because there are lots of options, and there are lots of options because there are a lot of different needs.

Which is why you can't say what the best way of presevering video is until the questions are answered in your case, and the questions are:

Why are you doing it?
Who are you doing it for?
What will they do with it?
When will they do it?