It is interesting that when using paper/printer profiles, we get to choose between "perceptual" and "relative", but no such thing when applying camera profiles.
For those who really need "accurate" colors (I am not one of them), would it not make sense to make a "color developer" that took into account camera vs lighting measurements, scene content and user preferences? If you image contains smooth gradations (e.g. sky) perhaps keeping them smooth is preferred over color accuracy. But if the image contains saturated patches of a single color (e.g. a red piece of clothing), perhaps it is better to render that patch "accurately" even if that means excessive noise in gradations that is not there in the scene anyways?
Or perhaps this is excessive engineering and everyone mess with their colors to achieve a subjective goal anyways.
Raw converters today are really designed to handle cameras like analog film cameras. A camera profile is designed to work with a specific contrast curve (that's why I think matrix profiles works so poorly - the color gets modulated when the film curve is applied) which usually is embedded in the profile itself. Changing profile is like changing "film stock".
Ideally the only thing you'd need to know about the camera would be the SSFs, and then the raw converter could convert that into color in various ways, and you could have look profiles etc.
But no converter works this way today, so we're stuck with the somewhat primitive design where camera profile = film stock. If raw converters would have been designed from scratch today I think they would be different, but there's a lot of legacy from the 1990s.
You can of course design several profiles for different uses so it's not a big deal.
