For those who think there are errors in my analysis: "Put up or shut up". Quoting some unknown friend who says: "He gets some things right but also quite a few wrong." is of no value.
Here's one blatant error:
Your discussion of standard deviations per level is completely nonsensical. You completely fail to recognize that as the photon count increases, you are increasing the sample population, and that
decreases the standard deviation and
increases the overall accuracy of the sampling (or confidence factor) by approximately the square root of the photon count. This is why digital images are noisiest in the shadows--the photon sample population per pixel is smallest in the darkest tones, and largest in the lightest tones. Your "Poisson Aliasing" chart seems to be assuming that the standard deviation increases (or at least stays constant) in proportion to average photon count as one increases the photon count, but this is completely backwards. As the photon count increases, the standard deviation
decreases (at least when expressed as a percentage of the photon count) because you have a larger sample population of photons to work with. It's the same statistical principle used for calculating the margin of error for opinion surveys--the larger the sample population, the
smaller the standard deviation becomes as a percentage of the sample population, and the greater the accuracy of the survey results becomes as a result.
If you were correct, the lighter tones in a digital image would be just as noisy or even noisier than the deep shadows. But this is the opposite of the behavior of every digital camera ever made. You need to go back and get the Statistics 101 stuff right before getting fancy with Poisson aliasing and stuff like that.