Who said anything about extra physical controls? All of those features could be implemented in the menus of the 5DIII. The 5DIII already has "Scene Intelligent Auto" (the Green setting)
My point is that the green box itself is a top level item (it takes a spot on the mode dial, at least on the 5DII).
Putting the art filters inside any menu, which requires a few steps of navigation to reach and also generally requires taking ones eye from the viewfinder, renders them considerably less useful (aside from the fact that most users of this body consider such features useless in general this would make them a little bit more useless).
As long as they are buried inside a menu, those features wouldn't actually be harmful. I'm going out on a limb here, but my guess is that there haven't been a lot of requests for these features from 5D users. Your post is the first I've heard of this.
This is not about loss leaders/free riders. People paying $0 for their blogs get ads on their site, so they are not necessarily loss leaders/free riders.
You seem to be trying really hard to not understand here. The marginal software development cost of adding users to a software product is 0. Therefore the economics of developing software are completely different to those of developing camera bodies.
Far from providing any illumination, your analogy is off base and amounts to a willful obfuscation of an issue that you are apparently unwilling or unable to address in a more forthright manner.
As the 5DIII already has green box setting, and that setting already activates its own abbreviated version of the camera's standard menus (fewer tabs, fewer options), the creative filters and scene modes could easily reside there and still be useful. Set the camera to green box, hit the menu button, select the filters tab, choose your filter. Or do it via the Q button.
But your guess is that creative filters and scene modes are not included because most users of this body consider such features useless in general. Your guess is that there haven't been a lot of requests for these features from 5D users.
I believe your guess is absolutely correct. Note that your guess doesn't rely on the popular "cripple the camera" theory.
I believe your guess also correctly explains exactly why AFMA is not included on the new Rebel SL1: useless to most users, not a lot of requests for it. So the manufacturer makes the most sensible decision.
You're avoiding the question about whether the useful "edit CSS" feature should be offered to all WordPress.com customers, regardless of how much they pay, or only with the $99/year Pro Bundle. Is it right to "cripple" that feature on all sites that don't purchase the Pro Bundle? We've heard from some people in this thread that the cost of adding AFMA to any camera is zero; -- it's just software already written for other cameras, so the cost of adding it to any Rebel is zero. I'm not sure that's true, but if it is true, then the economics are the same. In either case, the feature is useful to s
ome buyers and it's a zero cost add-on for the company, but buyers have to spend more to get it. Just as with cameras, they have to buy the more advanced model just to get that one feature which could have been included in the most basic model. Good, bad, shocking?