Quick perspective check:
If you play a 44.1kHz recording back at 88.2kHZ, it plays back an octave higher. This is a very simple way of showing that the difference in recorded range amounts to one octave when you double the sampling rate.
If you play back a 44.1kHz recording at 48kHz, it plays back at fractionally more than a half-step higher... (1 seimtone is just under a 6% speed difference...)
3.9kHz sounds like a big number until you realise that it's only buying you a semitone at the top end... and since many manufacturers of earlier digital gear didn;t
want to build two sets of reconstruction/anti aliasing filters, with close-tolerance components and all the attendant expense, some even left the same set of (lower cutoff frequency) low-pass filters in place, and spent the extra money making them a little bit better, instead of building two sets of cheaper, worse filters... The net result in these cases was a bit-rate penalty with no benefit save for compatibility...
Nobody's ever convinced me that they can tell the difference between 48k and 44.1 blindfold, though the higher steps between sample rates are rather more rewarding.
Round here, professional projects are done at 48k and multiples. Makes the video guys sweat a lt less when we do it that way. Small-time CD release stuff is done at 44.1k, since it means that we get about 7% more storage space on the drives and no SRCs between the mix-in-the-box and the final CD.
If it's going through an analog mastering stage out if house, I ask the mastering guy, but he usually says he'll take either...
There's no single 'right or wrong' answer, but there's often one which works really well for a given project. -Just think about what it has to synchronise with, and that usually makes the choice for you!
Keith