I still love locality animals as much as ever, my favourite lines of what I work with today are still locality, but it's just not where the overwhelming majority of the hobby is now. It's morphs. That's just the reality. I find it difficult to imagine it being possible to have a reasonable number of friends in the herp scene without any of them owning a single morph, but if you're in that situation it's very cool and you're probably the only one. Your herp friends, if they have a reasonable number of other herp friends, will know someone with morphs.
I vividly remember a time when I had never seen a snake morph in the flesh. I remember the first morph that we'd recognise as a morph hitting the Australian hobby (albino Olives, first up for sale in 2002). I naively felt extremely resistant to the idea and had absurd hopes that unlike the Americans and Europeans, Australians would not embrace morphs! Haha! How ridiculously wrong I was. Amusingly, I wasn't alone, and it was about 5 more years before there was a critical mass of acceptance of morphs in Australia. I staunchly held hope until it was pointed out to me that the herp scene was clearly developing into a pet hobby rather than herpetology which it previously had been, and morphs would get the majority of keepers (a rapidly growing number) interested in working with captive lines rather than going out flipping rocks and wrecking habitat, etc. It was a good thing I changed my mind when I did because it wasn't much later that I fluked the first albinos of a new species of snake and was the fourth Australian to establish an albino snake in the hobby.
I sort of miss working with the Elchos. The thing about pure lines like that though, as with several other lines I decided to part with, was that there wasn't really anywhere to go with them. Elchos were notorious for being difficult to get feeding, but after a couple of generations of selecting the best feeders I had them producing clutches which mostly fed well. But, then, there wasn't really any room for progress. Great snakes, I loved them, but... what could I do? They weren't particularly popular at the time (and as soon as anyone bothers to breed a couple of clutches the market will be saturated again) and I couldn't develop them in any direction. I am not a fan of just having animals sitting around idle doing nothing, so a few years ago I sold the last of them, and while I enjoy seeing them in other collections I have no interest in keeping them again. That same outcome is fairly inevitable with most locality lines, and really, a lack of progress (or change of any sort) is the only goal which makes sense for them (personally, for reasons which aren't rational and are only sentimental, I still like to make pretty snakes from locality lines. It's silly, but hobbies don't need to make sense, right? Haha!).
Most of the time you won't be able to get the exact locality data. Like, even with Elcho Island (which is a fairly large island and might even have variation within it), I guarantee you won't get an exact locality for captive animals. Where on Elcho Island were they collected? New Guinea is an island and Chondros on it have been split into quite a number of taxa, with plenty of regional variation. Tasmania is an Island and the tigers there vary a lot. Heck, even looking at the topic of this thread, Diamonds, they vary significantly in different localitions in the Sydney region alone, so what's a locality?
Don't get me wrong, I really admire people with a love for locality animals and I share it. It's just that the reality is that the number and proportion of herpers who care about it is dropping, and that's not going to change.
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Wild snakes will still exist in the wild, in greater numbers and diversity than in captivity. If you want to add to diversity, morphs are the way to do it! Wildtypes will always exist in the wild, morphs (for the most part) will only exist in captivity. Bright colourful snakes bring many benefits to the hobby. 8 year old boys like the ones you and I were will still exist, running around playing with snakes, falling in love with nature, etc.
Like it or not, morphs and hybrids are part of the future, and a bigger part of the future of captive herps than natural forms will be, especially with the most popular snakes. In fact, the morphs are what makes the most popular snakes popular. If the world's most popular snake (Ball Python, which for the record I absolutely loathe) only had one colour and pattern type, virtually no one would be keeping them. Same deal with the world's #2 snake. If Carpet Pythons all looked like Olive Pythons and Olives came in a range of colours and patterns, the numbers of Olives and Carpets being kept would be reversed.
Don't hold your breath waiting for people to stop liking bright, shiny and new things! Basic human nature will not change. Hobbyists who like wildtypes won't entirely disappear for as long as I'm alive, even if I'm the last one, but we will never again be the majority.
