I agree and to me, it doesn't make any sense for the R3 to be lower resolution than the R5 especially if it comes in at $6K. What are we getting for $2K besides a grip and eye focus?
This is a tough one, if it is lower resolution I could see this ending up around $4500-5000 to compete more with the A9, which makes it a little more understandable.
But outside of that, for almost all of my uses Canon has really sold me on high-speed 45mp. My R5 is my primary camera, over the 1DX2, mostly for that reason, and if this camera ends up lower than 45 megapixels, I'm likely going to just buy a second R5 and put a battery grip on it. BSI is nice, but my R5's silent shutter doesn't significantly bother me as is, and I've gotten plenty of great action shots and birds in flight with the silent shutter.
I've been a lifelong fan of the 1-series, and far prefer a solid, built-in grip over a battery grip, but the R5 is just *so* good it's really gonna take a lot to justify spending 1000s more on a lesser spec when I could be spending the same money on new RF glass. I'm kind of coming to terms with that, to be honest. It would be nice to have two of the same camera and not have to worry which one I pick up.
I know the point of this camera is for a similar market to the 1D, which I've always understood doesn't particularly need much resolution. But I've always been in that market, as someone who works with newspapers that downsample everything to just 2 megapixels for print, and I have been *blown* away by how much more I can crop an image and still make the front cover of a print paper thanks to 45 megapixels. That's a value that I can't really dismiss, and I've found it to give me far more use than just adding FPS.