Originally posted by Nicolas06 You have some hypothesis on how the average flagship APSC DSLR buyer behave (D7200, K3-II, 7D Mk II...). For you their usage is very basic and so they don't need that advanced AF.
First I'am not sure it is the reality and that most flagship DLSR users do not use AF-C and don't need it.
Second then to me that's more a mistake then. If the users of this kind of gear don't need the advanced features they could buy a cheaper version.
Third, one might want to buy gear that allow him to grow. It might be better decision to buy a K3 now for a bit more and getting everything except pixel shift than making a bargain on a slightly cheaper K-S2 and then buying a K3-II in 1 year to get better AF. I would agree Nikon would be a better choice for that as all their flagship have good AF while Pentax still need progress.
I think the real question is how much benefit the extra auto focus points offer with regard to performance. Stick 300 auto focus points on the K3 might make tracking better, but how much better than 35 or 65? And the down side is that manually choosing a focus point becomes more difficult. Beyond which, in order to truly get good tracking, you need adequate lenses, which is to say, I guess currently you need the 150-450 or the 70-200. SDM lenses are going to keep up with most sports, however many focus points you stick in your camera.
A lot of features are thrown in like extra megapixels -- not because people need them or use them, but because people know inherently that more is better. The K20 had 16 metering segments, the K7 had 77 and the K3 has 86,000. There is no doubt that there were lots of problems with the older cameras with the metering system being fooled by small by bright points of light, but there is probably some number of segments between 77 and 86,000 after which there is little benefit to adding more segments.
In the end, Pentax needs to sell cameras and they will add "features" and try to make sure that their cameras stack up well against the competition. I just don't think that a lot of these features actually give a lot of benefit to the majority of photographers.