Just playing devil's advocate:
Film camera R&D is almost nothing compared to DRF R&D, so your first bullet point doesn't really work. This is part of the reason we got such great cheap Bessas. The film transport and much of the tooling has been around for decades at Cosina. Manual wind / manual focus SLRs wouldn't sell anymore, so Cosina realized it could spend some R&D on a great compact RF mechanism and sell their cameras for ~$600.
As for the "bite the bullet" part... Zeiss has always been a lens company more than a camera company, so again the point falls kinda flat. They're certainly not an electronics company like Panasonic, Samsung, or to a large extent Canon/Nikon. I'd bet Zeiss make way more of their money from Cine lenses and other things than from anything related to 35mm photography (most of which they don't even make themselves, but only design). Zeiss also probably doesn't want to put its "premium" brand on something that doesn't work well, so why wouldn't they wait for the technology to make a decent FF DRF?
The R&D in a digital camera are primarily the sensor and firmware...there is no need for a transport, and thus no tooling either.
🙂
AND, Zeiss/CV had already built an even better RF for the ZM...long base, bright, good eye relief...many opined that it is even better than Leica's pride and joy [and I concur, I have both an M and a ZM].
Long ago Canon, and recently Nikon/Sony had all achieved full-frame sensors and successful commercial products. All Zeiss has to do is to negotiate with [recently renewed for 5 years] partner Sony.
Zeiss does more electronics than most people realize. Few are aware that Zeiss has a 112 Mpixel (8000 x 14,000) DMC aerial camera since 2001...$1.5 million++. The lens was sourced from Jena [formerly East German Zeiss, now called JenOptik]. And just last year they released a new RMd model. [Search under Z/I Imaging.] What do you think the firmware of those cameras are like...and the circuit boards and...
[Zeiss also did Forward Motion Compensation in aerial cameras in the '50's and any number of classified cameras under USAF contracts. In the industry, we say "
Zeiss is nice...and Zeiss is right"].
There is no question that "Zeiss is optics". I said so myself often. Ernst Abbe, deceased a century ago, physicist and silent partner of Carl Zeiss the businessman, whose will
founded [and funded] the Zeiss we know today [really a foundation, not a commercial company].
Abbe invented methods of making good lenses so that Zeiss could make its famous microscopes, and cameras, and planetariums and range finders [for artillery] and sniper scopes [for the WWII Mauser rifle] and... It has achieved its reputation
not by waiting.
