Thanks, you have some good ideas. It's not going to be a raw converter, I've excluded the capability to open all kinds of raw formats as it's a mess to maintain, and if you're a ACR user you need to make a DNG anyways to make sure conversion becomes the same as ACR. If/when ICC support is added I only need to add TIFF support as the ICC workflows go via that format rather than raw directly.
My vision is that it should be a camera profile designer that has good enough capabilities to make truly excellent general-purpose camera profiles -- with subjective tunings as there's no agreement of what the ultimate color is. In other words the goal is to break the monopoly the camera manufacturers and raw converter makers have today on making great general-purpose profiles. I think it's unfortunate that people choose camera based on what profile that comes built-in into the default workflow, but that is the situation when there is no good camera profile design tool available to the public.
To the average user I think it's hard to not be a "single use" program as you say, but that's not too bad I think. Perhaps commercially it would be better for regular use, but if the software does what most need in a few clicks I'm happy. To the advanced user I think it will be a "periodic use" software, that is you don't really use it regularly but at times you put some effort into getting a profile juuust right for your camera and your taste, and perhaps you go back to re-adjust a profile you made before, or use the comparison mode to check out some other profiles.
Profile makers often make up the idea that you should have a colorchecker in each of your scenes and then make scene-specific profiles, which gives you regular use. That may make sense for reproduction photography, but I don't think it makes much sense for general-purpose photography, and I can't really promote a use that I don't believe in, so single use to periodic use it is... :-)
Anders, this looks very promising.
A 1-click profile generator with well-picked defaults would be a very good start.
The technical manual tuning would be nice to have, but to make this more than a single-use tool (once you have built a profile for your camera you never use it again) it would be good to make it something that builds a community around it -- eg, people can contribute look operators -- and that doesn't require a deep understanding of illuminants and gamut compression.
The Adobe DNG editor has some useful features, but you can't see what difference your tweaks make and so the workflow with Lightroom / ACR is cumbersome. Finding a clever visual way of making comparisons between profiles or individual adjustments is the key to success. For example, being able to tune the DCampProf Natural or Natural+ profile generated profile (relative to the Adobe Standard, say) would be a good start. (So being able to pick up the profiles installed in your system without copying them and then using them to tune your own profiles would be a good start. Put another way, concentrate on easy workflow, rather than raw capability would be good.
My 1/2p. Happy to offer to B test at an appropriate time.