I am very conflicted with all of this.
As I noted in another thread, there is a major negative perception associated with this camera. Whether or not you can work around the limitations of the camera remains a question, but the growing perception is that this camera has serious flaws.
For me, it is more of a practical question - what did Canon want to achieve with the R5?
I would assume that they wanted to aim strategically at Sony and produce a compelling product that would retain their existing customer base, while growing that customer base at the expense of Sony and other competitors.
But does the R5 under its current perception do this? In my view, no it does not. Enough people have described the video functionalities as being "unusable" to the point that the camera will be mostly perceived in this manner - I simply do not understand how Canon hopes to expand their customer base with this product.
Another question I keep thinking about is whether Canon is simply technically unable to achieve better specifications and usability given their engineering teams and possible internal constraints. While it has been assumed that Canon has intentionally crippled their video in the past by offering only cropped modes, what if the real problem was always overheating, and Canon simply couldn't combat this? From an engineering perspective, I wouldn't expect Canon to be able to compete with Sony on things like heat dissipation systems - Sony simply has far more experience in this regard, and I'm sure there is a lot of cross-sharing of knowledge between their various R&D groups (e.g. they are building one of the most advanced cooling systems now for the PS5)
Where Canon does offer more compelling capabilities versus Sony is in their optics - their lenses. Furthermore, I believe that the larger diameter of the RF mount will allow Canon to build faster (hopefully a 50mm f1.0 in the near future??) and more advanced lenses like the 28-70 f2 whereas the smaller diameter of the E mount will further limit what Sony is able to accomplish. BUT - the gap between Sony and Canon continues to shrink, and I really do wonder how Canon will remain competitive in the future if they cannot improve the perception of their products.
Given the issues at hand, and what Canon wanted to achieve, I would say that a firmware update of some sort is absolutely necessary in order to get this product to a more usable state. Even for a non-professional like myself, taking photos on a given day and then not being able to use the video functionality due to overheating restrictions would be frustrating. Using the 4K line-skipping mode is simply not an option - for those who purchased an R5, only the best PQ will do, and that will mean either 4K HQ or 8K footage. If Canon had utilized pixel binning instead of line-skipping, perhaps the lower end 4K mode could have been a better option.
For me personally, I've decided to hold off on any purchase right now. Going all into the R5 would be very costly for me - with the body, adapter, batteries, CF express cards and a new RF lens, I'd be looking at $8-10K CAD easily. At that cost, I want something that is truly the best out there, with no compromises in performance. Perhaps that could be the Canon R1? But if Canon is smart, and they want to drastically improve their perception, they need to come up with a solution here. A big driver of the R5 was to improve that perception - that the cripple hammer was finally going away and Canon was finally listening to their customer base - well if that's the case, then they really need to listen up here! Remember that the Sony a7 is right around the corner - Canon needs to respond big time, and it shouldn't be with another body.