I think you underestimate people. If you're an admin doing user support for such a system and someone says they need more storage because of blah blah blah then

I think you underestimate people. If you're an admin doing user support for such a system and someone says they need more storage because of blah blah blah then you offer ways to alter the workflow so they don't need 500G of tiff files. It might even speed up their workflow since it's not streaming 500G off disk. No need to get into bit depth and int float str and double (though all of the biomedial researchers I've worked with knew these very well). Just: 'you can convert to png and back again without losing data. Just like zipping a file and unzipping it again. Let me show you how...'