[ICanHas]

with nonlinear loads, a multimeter must have DSP in order to measure properly.

It's still possible to do it in analog

Finally, an implied agreement that your earlier statement is wrong.

but it's just not cost competitive with digital nowadays. On a fixed budget, digital does way better than analog for this application.

Cost as seen from which point of supply chain? I agree that the starting manufacturing cost to "make it work" is lower. It certainly would be difficult to offer a multimeter that retails for $6 using analog that approaches the accuracy of $6 DMM. Digital micro controller embedded systems is without doubt cookie cutter automated assembly line production friendly.

Regardless of raw materials and processing cost, something of PM300 caliber digital power analyzers with flexible averaging time are a far fetch from "cheap".

It also allows features like long duration averaging that are difficult to do in analog. In particular, when dealing with time constants longer than a few seconds (plus high accuracy requirements), leakage currents become a big problem when designing analog circuits.

Reference? This is something I have to study more, so I need references. Digitally integrated values have its own problem with wrongly rejecting signal as noise or valuable data misses the train.

Gain in weight of wood by leaving it at a higher temperature and comparing weight at two points is a result of comparing the value between the analogly accumulated values between top and bottom bounds of integration limits.

The gain/loss of moisture is naturally done with an infinite resolution, but digital means of will probably result in accumulation of errors.