RAW can be it's own entire nasty^nasty rabbit hole. The sorts of stuff that honestly do make me wonder if certain raw formats have their own unique ways of exposing vulnerabilities in accepted ways of implementing.
Things that come to mind are;
- Compressed RAW images. Both the lossless and lossy variants, esp because every manufacturer does their own thing, well except maybe MFT[0], buuuut;
-For MFT, my understanding is that the RAW doesn't just contain some info for LR/C1/DPL[1] or any other sufficiently implemented processing tool to apply correction data (again, I could be wrong, but I think that is something that the Micro 4/3 format does.)
[0] - Micro 4/3
[1] Light room, Capture One, DXO PhotoLab (FKA DXO OpticsPro)
MFT is a sensor size and lens mount, not a raw file format. Panasonic and Olympus (among others) have made cameras using this standard, but use different raw file formats.
JPEG engines are getting better and more configurable (Fuji recipes, LUTs on Panasonic) which makes this workflow more viable.
what i’d love is a good intermediary archival format that is more space efficient than RAW while keeping more editing latitude than a JPEG. using a dynamic preserving tone curve like Log in 14 bits and compressing it losslessly. although i wonder if that would be much better than compressed DNGs.