I have DMR radios but away from repeaters I'd agree that their usefulness is limited. In general digital is not the best choice for fringe coverage since you get little indication you're at low signal strength if you're not watching your RSSI. Most digital radios will use RSSI to determine when to start looking for a stronger repeater and it's a settable threshold in CPS as the point when to start roaming usually.
The range where the perceived audio quality is better will be relatively small. IOW, when you get good signal strength both analog FM and digital will sound fine (ignoring for the moment bandwidth and baseline quality, since DMR does sound good). When you get to a mid-range point where analog is no longer full quieting but still has a high signal-to-noise the digital radio will not have background static, so will seem to be better. And it is. Up until you hit the point where your SNR starts impacting bit error rate. That's when you can usually still understand voices in the noise with analog but get the robot sounding voices with digital modes that often just unintelligible.
That situation is tough in the backcountry because it's all or nothing and you often go from one extreme to the other due to terrain. That's why digital has taken some time to be adopted by firefighters in particular, who get themselves into places where structures cause SNR issues.
The good thing about DMR radios is they are usually very high quality and are therefore also typically very good analog radios, too. Mine are Vertex and Motorola, built like bricks with outstanding audio TX and RX even on FM. So you have a solid fall back.
