I used to work for Blackmagic Design in the BRAW team (yes, technically not RAW, Red somehow got a bullshit patent on the compression of RAW data that they defe

I used to work for Blackmagic Design in the BRAW team (yes, technically not RAW, Red somehow got a bullshit patent on the compression of RAW data that they defend aggressively). There was definitely an R&D cost associated with developing the libraries to read/write that format, and additional QA steps required when implementing them, but no additional hardware was needed (it actually required less on-hardware processing to write to RAW). If a company has RAW support on one camera but not another - especially for still photos, it is 100% a market segmentation strategy.