In several essays/articles on Michael's web site, he's made mention of the "always expose to the right" philosophy, whereby you capture as much information as possible about the relative lighting conditions available when you take the photo.
However, the practice of doing this and doing this correctly is not quite as simple as is made out because of the "blown highlights" problem if you go too far right. On top of this it also requires that all of your photos take a trip through photoshop or whatever to get adjusted to the correct numbers.
Considering both of these points, this led me to wonder if a better feature than the traditional +/-n AEB you get would be to have "current + what the camera thinks is best". So 2 photos rather than 1 or 3 (AEB). Why two? Because the idea would be for the camera to look at the photo it has just taken, work out what the maximum speed/aperature it can use to generate the required "most information" photo and then take that. Well, that's how a DSLR would need to work, a digicam could be expected to just have that setting and be a 1-click & done.
If such a feature were available, would people use it or is there too much risk in the camera adjusting things "wronly" for your chosen exposure to get the 2nd photo right?
There's also a risk that if there are some portions of the shot that are quite bright that it might underexpose too much (giving the inverse of the desired result.)
Or what if you could program the camera such that you could tell it what % of the histogram you wanted for each section? i.e. be able to tell the camera how you want the histogram to look and let it work out how to take the photo to make that happen rather than take a photo, review, adjust, etc.
Granted the average John Doe on the street isn't likely to want something like this...but even if a simple camera took a photo to maximise information and then adjusted that for what would be the correct exposure, would this be better than what we see today? Now that I ask that, how do I know that doesn't happen anyway?