> if you use open-source software you're still going to get great images Not necessarily. My D500's raws look OK in Darktable, but my D850's were awful last ti

> if you use open-source software you're still going to get great images Not necessarily. My D500's raws look OK in Darktable, but my D850's were awful last time I tried it, noisy and with patches of weird color casts. I didn't try very hard to fix it, because I like Lightroom's functionality and UI a lot better anyway. Maybe they've successfully reverse-engineered the format by now, and I respect their work immensely no matter that it doesn't work for me, but especially with relatively new or relatively high-end cameras there is no guarantee of good FOSS support for raw formats.