Yea and additionally, with few exceptions, all movies shot on film are scanned and finished into a DI. I'd love to see how you can call something scanned into a digital image, not "little boxes of colored cubes".

This argument is ridiculous, film is...nice, but if you need a specific capture medium to be disciplined, you're not actually disciplined, you're just using it as a crutch. I would also argue that story and acting are the two most important things in a film. If you're sitting there thinking about what capture medium a film was made with, then you're just not engaged in the film in an emotive way.

I don't really see how that's possible since color science doesn't come into play as a permanent thing until the r3d is debayered. The Weapon and Scarlet-W both do ProRes and have 3d lut support in combination with simultaneous Prores / DnxHD output, so this feels more like a Panavised Weapon with Light Iron built in LUTS, rather then a whole new camera.

Good luck putting that on a drone. For a lot of things the RED modular design is incredibly useful.

It might be outputting a custom LUTS in the metadata, but if the end file is a .r3d you're still just getting a REDRaw file. The "color" is just metadata so I'm not really seeing how this is any different from a RED Weapon.

Having ordered a Scarlet-W, I can tell you the cheapest you can put a package together if you buy all new components, is $17k.

Just about any DP who has been working a few years could get a loan to buy any camera on the market that is in high use. $16k for a fully featured body is the standard entry level for high end cameras. The new RED Scarlet-W is going to run $17k to get it running, C300 mkII is $16k, Alexa Mini is something arond $70k and I know people who have bought it on loan.

$6k-8k isn't a professional level camera, it's a DSLR / entry beginners package. If that is the price range that you're looking at, a A7S, BMCC, or used RED Scarlet MX are both good options depending on what you value in a camera.