Back in the day, people were rendering in wrong linear Gamma 1.0 space, and then someone came up with linear workflow, and there were lots of people popping up saying "Why change something that works, why introduce new confusion?", and then LWF slowly became standard.
What in the world are you talking about? It seems you are misinformed about the history of colour reproduction on digital devices.
What's more you seem to be throwing around CG related buzzwords at will without knowing what they do, why they exist or what the relationships they have with one another.
Now, first of all, I doubt most of the new users will ever encounter this. As I already mentioned, this workflow is becoming obsolete.
You keep saying this, and I'm telling you straight out that you are wrong. There have and always will be a goup, usually hobbyists and smaller boutique studios, that will want a final image with a single render, but there always will be the rest of us from hobbyists all the way up to the highest end VFX studios that will want, and need, to render out in passes. Please stop spreading misinformation.
Well, then set it straight, if you know better. If you are in CG for so many years already, you should quite well remember period of time many years ago when LWF was not yet standardized, and was even off by default in many of the mainstream DCC packages. Actually, in most of them. And people had no idea that they were viewing images in wrong color space, and were doing terrible things in post to fix the problems.
You seem to be constantly reminding me how much more you know, because you were around back in the age when dragons were wreaking havoc across fields of our kingdoms, but you still haven't gotten into specifics.
I am telling you, already, for the third time, that image being tone mapped by default won't result into passes not being usable. Most of the specialized render elements, such as world position, normal, velocity, are excluded from tone mapping by default. If this solution would be implemented, only CESSENTIAL render elements would be affected (actually, it is quite possible only beauty pass will end up being affected), and fixing it will be 1 click away from anyone who needs to do compositing.
You have completely biased view of division of userbase. It's not 50:50 those who composite separate render elements vs those who render everything together. It is more like 5:95, and it's shifting more towards one pass rendering every year. And do not misunderstand it as not using passes like world position, velocity, and such. I am
strictly talking
only about outdated process of compositing shading elements together (CESSENTIAL elements).
The entire point is taking a virtual, computer light and surface simulator, and making it output images that are a bit close to how human eye perceives real world by default. That's all. This will have more and more priority in the future.