Originally posted by Adam Releasing a new camera as often as others do now, or even as often as Pentax did before, would be suicide.
Usually, it costs almost the same to have designers design a new camera model or do nothing in the office. Canon and Nikon keep releasing new camera models on a regular basis as long as they employ their engineering staff. Same for phone makers, they keep releasing new models as long as they employs phone designers. The cycle time for electronic designs is between 12 months and 18 months. Not releasing a new camera model every 18 months means there is no camera design team assigned to a camera project. You could send the staff to do other works inside the group and have them come back to design a new camera model two year later, but usually they lost some skills for cameras or aren't up to date with camera tech anymore, or aren't interested to come back to the camera division after two years of absence. The only plausible reason why we haven't seen a new DSLR recently is that Ricoh dissolved some of the teams working on Pentax product lines (645z,K1,KP), and assigned the GRIII team to design a new Pentax DSLR, which means no new DSLR model before mid 2020, assuming GRIII designers are skilled to design high performance DSLR which I doubt because a D500 like camera has design challenges completely different from a GRIII compact camera, hence there could be further delay added to the average camera design cycle time.