You can pay for Lloyd, read some great tests, many of which seem to show the camera is just no good. Done.
Or you can rent it, try it and see if its possible for any company to make a camera with so many faults.
It also helps if you have a background in Fuji cameras as their approach is different.
Amazingly on my last trip, I had over 2400 images taken with the GFX, all 3 lenses plus the Mamiya 200mm APO and believe or not the focus on 98% was tack sharp. All but about 20% or less were hand held and AF was used. Hand holding a XF with any lens would not have given me anything close. The only issue did have with AF was when the camera picked an object closer in than I realized, and due to the extremely bright sunlight and how tired I was I did not think to check. Even the 200mm APO could be hand held many times and manually focusing it was easy at least for me.
I consider myself very picky on focus and have been over the 30 or so years I have worked in photography. I have yet to find anything wrong with the AF on the GFX or manual focus (besides the fact that images don't pop into sharp focus as well as they do on other brands), but this is true for all Fuji cameras, always has been. I will state here, I don't worry about focus shift in landscape work, may be a problem in macro work, but all the lenses for the GFX showed excellent clarity and sharpness for me. In fact the GFX saved me on 2 days in Yosemite as I quickly realized that carrying around the XF and 3 lenses and a tripod was more than I could or wanted to do.
For me it's very simple, if I can trust a camera's AF, I tend to get into a rhythm and stay there, not checking that often. I have used Phase gear since early 2008, various bodies and lenses, now on the XF and several Schneider lenses, I still check the focus after using AF, and mainly use Liveview. I rarely did this on the GFX, it worked just fine. The camera continues to impress me daily.
Pay and read Lloyd, no doubt his testing is excellent, rent or try the camera for yourself, I really don't think you will be very disappointed, period. This issue has been totally blown out of proportion and it's a bit sad to see it continue.
Best test is test it yourself, and see what you feel. ONE THING IS FOR SURE, don't preview the files at the default view on the camera as if you do you will immediately think everything is way to soft. The default preview is way past 100% more like 150% for some reason.
Posting a lot of small jpg files which can't show the full 100% view of the image is not worth it. Plus there is a lot of time involved in both such testing and writing. I fully understand why Lloyd charges. I would again ask, just attempt to either rent it or borrow one with the 63mm or 120mm as the 32-64 is next to impossible to find.
It will be interesting to read the full review on the GFX from LuLa. So far they seem to like it except for the cost different between the A7RII @ 42Mp and the GFX and 50MP.
Paul Caldwell
