[davidgay]

> Everything you said is supported by regular image formats. You can adjust white balance of any photo and you think image formats are only limited to 16-bit and sRGB?

No - the non-RAW image formats offered were traditionally JPG and 8-bit TIFF. Neither of those are suitable for good quality post-capture edits, irrespective of their colour space (in fact, too-wide a colour space is likely to make the initial capture worse because of the limited 8-bit-per-colour range).

These days there is HEIF/similar formats, which may be good enough. But support in 3rd party tools (including Adobe) is no better than RAW yet, i.e., you need to go through a conversion step. So...

[zrav]

Also don't forget one of the promises of RAW: That RAW developers will continue to evolve, so that you'll be able to generate a better conversion down the line than now. Granted, given the maturity of developers the pace of innovation has slowed down a lot compared to 20 years ago, but there are still incremental improvements happening.

Another advantage of RAW is non-destructive editing, at least in developers that support it and are more than import plugins for traditional editors. I rarely have to touch Photoshop these days.