If they want to play that nasty game, maybe the suppliers could buy stock cameras for $1000, desolder them, and reassemble them into hacker-friendly boards for $1200, and then resell the rest of the stock cameras for spare parts (e.g. mechanical shutter assembly) at 1/2 the cost of OEM service. Even if they can scoop up the huge graveyard of e.g. Canon 60Ds that photographers will turn over for $200 a piece, or 6Ds for $500 a piece, reverse engineer them, and recycle them into a Raspberry Pi module, that would be amazing.
Even with the CMV12000 though, someone should make a RPi module that "just works", or an alternative RPi that allows it to "just work", for those of us who want to spend our time working on the actual imaging and software ... it's kind of sad there's this huge graveyard of good sensors out there that just can't be used by imaging experts because electronics people gatekeep the industry and only release them at reasonable prices inside consumer devices, which isn't what those imaging experts want at least in terms of programmability, communication, and mounting options.