To Chuck Alaimo:
I will try this one more time. The situation that I find myself sometimes: I'm out several miles from my car, I only took a 300mm lens to keep the weight down. A subject (often times a bird which is small) comes up perched in a tree but requiring at least a 450mm lens. The bird won't wait. I quickly change to image area to Dx without changing the lens, I now can get my shot without the extra wasted space around the bird that would never fit into the composition. Sraw, and Mraw do not improve this situation. Post does work, but the full frame is much more that I need.
As you say, having mRaw or sRaw doesn't hurt to have also but for me, I prefer the cropped area where I choose the cropping when I'm shooting. Most of the time I do shoot full frame and hope that I'm carrying just the right lens. I'm done.
Like I said at first...different strokes for different folks. It's rare that I find myself in need of the reach/incam crop factor. I was never saying that my style of shooting applies to everyone, hence why I think there should be a split line in the 5 and 1 series bodies, one for sports, one for studio. Others here said more than once that they knew no one who would ever shoot in anything but RAW, while others here think its a unnecessary feature.
I shoot weddings, so for me its about having a file that I can work with while not blowing up my HD's in the process. 2000+ shots will be taken, the only X factor is how much space will each wedding take up. Crop mode, yeah, great if you want/need both the reach and smaller files. But, again, if your just looking to keep each wedding under 40 GB's, then not having sRAW and mRAW file options means each wedding will now take 80-120GB's. That will eat up storage space, CF cards and processor power ---- I know this style of shooting isn't what everyone does. But, there are lots of wedding shooters out there, and yeah, I only know 1 local wedding shooter with a d800 - and she has been asking many questions about how cut the file size down for post processing. Would I want a big MP body? You betcha I would. But do I need one? Right now no. My 5d3 on mRAW rocks a wedding like there's no tomorrow. Back to the point of it all, I really hope that if they put a big MP sensor in a 5d style body, it will be a split in the line --- a 5ds. That's all...