I disagree, linuxboy, on one point.
Old style cheesemaking practices, if followed properly, yield very fine and consitent results. I would bet must of the AOC's you enjoy (or other equivalent from whatever country) are made with age old techniques, and especially the lack of a pH meter.
The thing I have found is that a lot of people attempting the old practices really lack an understanding of a lot of the extra minute detail followed by the people who still do things this way.
PH meters and powdered starter cultures don't make it so that suddenly you can make the same thing over and over again. What they do for you is make it a whole lot easier to make the same thing over and over again.
It's all in the details. Master cheesemakers make consistent products by virtue of a great deal of experience and by being taught by genreations that came before them.
There is a place for techno-cheesemaking, it makes home cheesemaking accessible. Really the only way you can be effective with traditional methods is if you were well taught. I am fortunate enough to have been taught by one of the best, who was also a very good teacher. Having learned my cheesemaking high on a mountain first hand, I really am of the opinion that the precision and attention to detail necessary is not something that can be passed down in writing. You have to experience it, it is the only way you can learn it.
To answer to OP, yes there is some out here who do things the old ways. I for one, and those I learned from. There are countless cheesemakers in Europe who do things this way.
A lot of what is said today about the scientific method of cheesemaking is really a myth. It is not for one second necessary for any of the reasons they say it is, and I can prove it. You can go, for example, and sample a great number of Swiss Emmentaler AOC cheeses and always find something that is the same every time, from batch to batch. The AOC dictates this cheese be made by hand, with a whey culture. They never test the pH. Same with a great number of Swiss cheeses. The scientific method of cheesemaking would not sit well with many Swiss, almost an insult to the great traditions they have passed down for so long.
The only testing I ever learned to do was to test the acidity (not pH, but TA) of the whey culture, to make sure it was working properly. But when I was taught to do this, I was also told to taste it. Because, I was told, you can tell just as well by the taste how acidic it is as you can with phenolphthalein. You just had to do the chemical test so that there was some unit to write down on paper (the AOC wants you to record all of the details of the process. It's one way of assuring cheesemakers adhere to the standard methods accepted for cheeses of this name)
As for thermometers, well maybe this is one point where the technology is a good thing. It is possible to judge temperature with your finger, and do so accurately enough to yield consistent results (i.e. be accurate to within 1 or 2 degrees) but this takes a great deal of experience. Although not as long ago as you might think, this is how most did it.
Sterilization has ALWAYS been he rule. Even when cheesemakers knew nothing about bacteria, they knew to be sterile and to always be cleaning everything with boiling water. It does not take much to find out that a little dirtiness messes up the cheese, and then you loose your culture and your whole year's production is lost. There are records from the middle ages, mayber even earlier, detailing how clean cheesemakers were. Sterilization is not an option, it is an absolute necessity.
Also, specifric cultures is not a new thing either. What is knew is our ability to go to the store and buy whatever cultures we want, even on a whim.
Specific cultures have been important to cheesemaking traditions as long as there has been such a thing. But the process was that of isolating specific local strains and preparing the cheese and the culture in such a way as to encourage these.