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At least so it seems https://www.dpreview.com/news/panasonic-did-what-apple-sony-and-nikon-couldnt-overturn-a-red-raw-video-patent/

There is one important point here : ) A Japanese decision invalidating the Japanese patent does not, by itself, kill equivalent patents in the US, Europe or anywhere else (even if they belong to the same patent family). Patent rights are territorial and each national right has, legally speaking, its own existence within its own jurisdiction. So no, compressed RAW has not suddenly become free for everyone everywhere : ) What is interesting is something else: if the claims are substantially equivalent (and that is obviously the important bit), the reasoning used in Japan may well become useful ammunition in other validity challenges. That is why, for me, the really interesting question is what Panasonic (or anyone else) does next. If equivalent RED claims start falling elsewhere too (particularly in the US), then yes, we may be looking at a very different landscape. - E. :- )

You are totally correct, however a fair bit of what I (we) shoot is delivered at the end of the the day, and TBH I can't bring myself to delete OG files when our productions are in the six digits. I ended up buying two 1TB owc cards, but still download and backing up to hard drives for a client and or producer end of a shoot day and asking them to hang around for another 40 min after a 12-15 hour day is not pleasant. Also I've seen this a few times on set where they shoot Raw and convert over to PRR LT without utilizing any of the raw capabilities and then deleting the raw, which makes me always why shoot raw in the first place!!!!

The FX2 makes a lot more sense than people give it credit for. If you actually need open gate, internal RAW, 4K120 or the stacked sensor, then sure: FX5. If you don't, you're paying nearly another $2K for features you may never use. FX2 gives you full frame, 4K60, S-Log3, proper AF and an EVF already built in. For a lot of jobs that's enough. Different job. Different tool.

That works for long-term storage, but there are really two separate problems here. Transcoding R3D NE to H.265 solves the archive size. It does not solve the card capacity, ingest time, temporary disk space or transcoding time. A more efficient compromise might be to keep R3D NE only for the selects that actually benefit from RAW flexibility, then batch-transcode the rest to H.265 in REDWideGamutRGB / Log3G10. So the weak internal H.265 still matters. The workaround is viable, but it moves the cost from storage to workflow.

Why does nobody talk about the FX2? Much better value for money!

If you can afford the cards and temporary space on an internal drive, you could shoot in R3D NE in camera and then after transferring the files to the computer, convert it to log h.265 and delete the original files. By doing this you can get high-quality h.265 and avoid the long-term accumulation of storage otherwise needed for the raw files, not much different from having a high-quality h.265 codec in the camera, apart from the fact that you would need large memory cards and some space on the computer's internal drives for this step. I'm not trying to make an excuse for Nikon for the h.265 but suggesting a workaround who have this camera for one reason or another, and need a practical workflow.

Compressed RAW is probably the part I'd focus on before adding more film simulations. For the dropped frames, a small diagnostics page could be useful: sensor timestamp delta, queue depth, compression time per frame, sustained write MB/s and dropped-frame count. That should make it much easier to see whether the bottleneck is capture, compression or storage. I'd also preserve per-frame black/white levels and WB/colour-matrix metadata where the device exposes them. Especially useful if you want the RAW processing and calibration to remain consistent across ISO changes. Interesting project.

Have you thought about background continuity too? With people and traffic constantly changing, wouldn't traditional coverage sometimes make things harder rather than easier when you get to the edit? I wonder if longer takes, a few selective close-ups and plenty of B-roll might actually suit this kind of shooting better. ☺️