Hmm... Plenty of DR on which camera exactly?
Any camera made since the Canon D30. Literally. Unless you have bright sky versus deep canyon shadow or sun-in-the-frame, you have enough DR. You had enough DR on E6 Provia (8ev).
The thing is, 11-stop DR means you can capture some details in a scene with 11-stop contrast. But in order to process it, you actually need more room.
That's not how it works. A DxO reported DR of 11 stops doesn't mean there's a cliff on the shadow end of the sensor. DxO looks for a noise threshold and stops counting once they hit that. That doesn't mean the image stops. This is why I'll make the comment that a 1 stop DR difference between sensors amounts to a few ticks on the NR slider. If you wrote an algorithm to NR the RAW file while leaving it RAW, then fed that file to DxO's software, the software would spit out a higher DR for the same sensor.
Naturally that won't work for 2, 3, 4, 1,000 stops. NR can only do so much. The point is that a DxO reported DR is not a cliff past which all data ceases to exist.
I'm not actually fond of sun-in-the-frame shots. Unless the sun is behind the clouds or very low down to the horizon. Higher DR in those conditions means less of the sky is blown out.
That's not being contested. It's also trivial to handle with two frames, a GND filter, or if the exposure is long enough, a 3x5 card moved over the top of the frame at the right moment.
Also when shooting seascapes or waterfalls, you get very bright spots on the water. almost as bright as the sun sometimes. Higher DR often means a difference between a keeper and a throw-away shot, no matter how good your skills are and what filters you use.
HDR handles this without issue. For that matter, the water is generally bright and part of the highlight half of the scene which means so do filters. Beyond that...water in sunlight with no specular highlights at all looks fake as can be. You don't want large blown out areas of white. But the sun glistening off the water is what our eyes see, and our eyes have more DR than any Sony sensor.
We see there's a lot of wonderful shots taken with low-DR cameras. That's fine. What we don't see is failed and discarded shots taken with low-DR cameras.
We also don't see the failed and discarded shots taken with high-DR cameras. Sony fans act as if Canon (off-chip ADC) sensors have less DR than Velvia while their DR is unlimited. Both parts are completely false. To give one example: there is a 2.3 stop difference between a 5Ds and a D8x0. That's 19%. That's a fairly narrow band. When you start getting into contrasty scenes it means a D8x0 might capture the scene in one frame where the 5Ds could not, but often
neither can do it successfully in one.
Sony fans also like to point to pictures where they pushed shadows 1ev and say "Canon can't do that" when a D30 could do it.
On my (calibrated) monitor the unedited shot doesn't look hugely contrasty in the first place. It looks like it wasn't very dark in that canyon as I can see all the details in the shadows in the left (unedited) image.
You cannot see 'all the details' in the left side. What you can see are shapes of things. The darkest parts are flat black, while a lot of it is just shy of flat black. E6 film could not have handled that scene. Portra would have struggled, though I imagine MF Portra scanned on a high end scanner could have handled it. The right B&W film and developer could have handled it, though dodging and burning it into place in the darkroom (versus a scan edited in PS) wouldn't have been fun.
The point wasn't to say an original 7D could match an on-chip ADC sensor. The point was that when people act as if Canon's older architecture is horrible on DR they are wrong.
Our choices are between good and very good.