We asked camera companies why their RAW formats are all different and confusing

Look at the decoders for each format that darktable supports here: https://github.com/darktable-org/rawspeed/tree/develop/src/l...

It's some binary parsing, reading metadata, maybe doing some decompression-- a thousand lines of C++ on average for each format. These aren't complex codecs like HEVC and only reach JPEG complexity by embedding them as thumbnails!

Cameras absolutely could emit DNG instead, but that would require more development friction: coordination (with Adobe), potentially a language barrier, and potentially making it harder to do experimental features.

Photographers rarely care, so it doesn't appreciably impact sales. Raw processing software packages have generally good support available soon after new cameras are released.

Technically speaking, implementing DNG would be another development activity on top of a RAW export, because RAW also has a purpose in development and tuning of the camera and its firmware.

It is supposed to be raw data from the sensor with some additional metrics streamed in, just sufficiently standardized to be used in the camera-vendors' toolchain for development.

It just "happens" to be also available to select for the end-user after product-launch. Supporting DNG would mean adding an extra feature and then hiding the RAW-option again.

I can imagine it's hard to make this a priority in a project plan, since most of the objectives are already achieved by saving in RAW

This is what I was thinking, that there are potentially so many RAW formats because there are so many sensors with potentially different output data. There should be a way to standardize this though.