@Jao vdL, "This is one of the reasons why we really need the ability to turn off built-in lens profiles for all mirrorless cameras, not just a select few recent ones. Still can't understand why Adobe does not allow us to just do this in the interface instead of having to manually edit the raw file."
Five years ago, I posted the following in the old feedback forum:
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Camera Raw Engineer Chris Castleberry has stated that Adobe obeys the wishes of Sony with respect to external lens profiles:
https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/disable-built-in-lens-profile?topic-reply-lis...
So it's a reasonable assumption that Adobe is also obeying the wishes of manufacturers with respect to embedded lens profiles. If that's true, people should be complaining to the manufacturers at least as loudly as to Adobe. (In my opinion, both are equally negligent in ignoring the desires of their customers.)
The underlying dynamic is likely driven by Adobe's legal department, rather than a business or product decision for "currying favor" with camera manufacturers. In another context (reading capture-date time zones from metadata), an Adobe engineer indicated that Adobe's legal department believes that Adobe software should not, without the manufacturer's legal permission, read information from non-industry-standard, manufacturer-specific metadata fields (e.g. Makernotes and raw information).
Thus, it appears that Adobe needs contractual permission from each manufacturer to read their raw files. This gives the manufacturers like Sony negotiating leverage with Adobe over what LR may do.
I don't know of other software vendors who have adopted Adobe's legal interpretation about non-standard, manufacturer-specific data fields in raw files. There's certainly a lot of software out there that reads all sorts of non-standard manufacturer-specific metadata. I spent some time a couple years ago looking online to learn if this legal interpretation was used by other companies and couldn't find anything. In general, laws about "reverse engineering" are a complicated mess and vary by country (and even within the US).
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In a much later bug report (which I can't find), Adobe employee Rikk Flohr explained that the manufacturers of newer cameras, not Adobe, decide which combinations of cameras/lenses can have their profiles disabled.
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And in a recent post:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-allow-override-of-automatic-lens-correction...
I speculated that the contracts between manufacturers and Adobe include information sharing about the raw formats, giving the manufacturers leverage in dictating to Adobe rhow embedded lens profiles should be handled.
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And in a follow-up to the five-year-old post (which is lost from my archives), I guessed that the cost of having Adobe's legal department revise dozens of form contracts with the manufacturers would swamp the trivial engineering cost of allowing the lens profiles of older cameras to be disabled. Since the legal department reports to the CEO or CFO and not to the Creative Cloud business line, the legal costs would get charged to the Creative Cloud budget.
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