>Interchangeable lens should come with chromatic abberation/distortion profiles on a chip that communicates with the camera so we can buy cheaper and lighter lenses with fewer elements.
Pretty much this, and this is what some people already do with pancake lenses, correcting the result in post. However there's a problem with this: for the universal vendor-supplied profiles to work well, the lens must still be made within pretty tight tolerances, so the cost reduction is limited. And proper manual calibration is really expensive and tedious, which defeats the point.
I don't know if there's a niche, but I'd love to see some startup doing the full-fledged lens and body calibration (STF/OTF and stuff) on demand to make high quality custom tailored profiles. That way you can use really cheap and compact lenses to get the same result; software correction can do wonders nowadays.
Of course. But it can fix many artifacts like field non-uniformity and distortions (both spectral and spatial), which otherwise require more lens elements, precise production and exotic materials to fix. Software correction is typically slightly lossy, but it's a reasonable trade-off. Per-lens/per-body calibration extends this much more than it's currently possible with vendor-supplied profiles, but requires pretty complex and expensive gear.
Pretty much this, and this is what some people already do with pancake lenses, correcting the result in post. However there's a problem with this: for the universal vendor-supplied profiles to work well, the lens must still be made within pretty tight tolerances, so the cost reduction is limited. And proper manual calibration is really expensive and tedious, which defeats the point.
I don't know if there's a niche, but I'd love to see some startup doing the full-fledged lens and body calibration (STF/OTF and stuff) on demand to make high quality custom tailored profiles. That way you can use really cheap and compact lenses to get the same result; software correction can do wonders nowadays.