I've never understood camera profiles. How does saturation in the profile relate to LR's saturation slider for that colour? What would this suggestion accomplish? Is there something I can read?
Jeremy
and I think I misread your question - if you are talking about "hue/saturation" sliders in "camera calibration" tab of ACR/LR then here is what happening I think - long time ago Adobe used to have only matrix profiles (and coded inside ACR source code on top of that - no external DCP files were available)...
I think the color transform done by those matrices back then was from from camera RGB digital numbers to cieXYZ(D50) and then simply to ProPhoto gamut for some other work that converter was doing (for example with regular saturation slider, etc)...
so those sliders were allowing for example to fit certain light sources within the prophoto gamut or do some creative mods for those embedded profile - because there were no other tools that could do the job before the color transform was over...
then came various versions of DCP profiles and even tools to build/mod those and nowadays you have (supplied from Adobe) profiles that have some matrix part (ColorMatrix to calculate WB math & ForwardMatrix to transform "whitebalanced" DNs to cieXYZ) and some LUT part(s) - one or two and actual real color transform is pulled by those LUTs, however for compatibility reasons and for cases when you have still colors like certain unnatural LED lights, etc the camera calibration tab was left intact... and in cases when LUTs inside DCP can't for example handle certain light sources (like some extreme blue/neon LED lights) you can use those slider to pull the color back from being clipped at the expense it being desaturated - they still affect the matrix part, not embedded in ACR code but how ForwardMatrix from DCP profile is applied, where it maps camera RGB numbers in cieXYZ colorspace before LUTs from DCP start doing the real color transform...
I certainly can be wrong, but madmanchan (Eric Chan) does not visit this forum anymore it seems...