After my lengthy reply, I have still been thinking about this. What I'd most like to add isn't an answer to the question "How has your photography evolved", but instead an answer to the related question "How has your photography stayed the same".
And this is what drew me to Fuji.
What has stayed the same is that apertures change several things, and shutter speeds change several things, and sensitivity or ASA or ISO change several things. For each, the brightness level in the image is one of those things - but brightness is never the ONLY thing that changes! And that is not a problem. That is part of what I like thinking about when taking pictures.
I've always used manual aperture and shutter speed. I also used what I'll call "manual film speed", in the sense that I thought about what film speed would suit my needs when loading the camera, though, sadly, in the past the speed couldn't be chosen for each individual shot.
What made me reluctant about getting seriously into digital photography was that the digital cameras I was aware of were designed to shoot on auto exposure. Some of them had ways to shoot manually instead, but typically this involved extra effort to override the automatic, maybe dig down into menus to get to each manual setting. About as much fun as entering a complicated password using a TV remote with just a few keys (we went through that the other night).
What drew me to Fuji, when somebody pointed it out to me, was that some models put dials for all these things right there in plain view. I love that! It makes digital photography OK! And all the other things I mentioned go on to make it great.