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"And yes, I still miss my 1/8" jack on my iphone. Every single day. And stay off my lawn, you whippersnappers."

In my case so that I can use, with appropriate adapters in some cases, reasonably nice over-ear headphones (Beyerdynamic, Grado and Seinheiser). Do I really need several stages of modulation, propogation, reception and demodulation between me and my signal?

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Exactly this. It's nice that lightning theoretically gives you more throughput but it's completely pointless if the signal has to get transformed a half dozen times between device and ear.

And all the nicer phones aren't going to lightning cables either because the Pro Audio community (the people primarily buying $3-400 non Beats headphones) would revolt.

Yes, has anyone looked at the quality of the DAC in the 'dongle'?

Some tests are referenced in this article:

https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/

I dunno. Decent cans don't generally drive well from phones anyway - so you're stuck with an external amp. Many amps have integrated DACs... why not just feed digital audio to the amp/dac via lightning?

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