Note: I was speaking in terms of corporate think, not what proved to be correct in the market, or correct in a technical sense. Clearly the screw mount limits options when it comes to further automation and proprietary commercial interest, it's just does your upper management believe the future is here so soon or not. Apparently Pentax management was not overly concerned about moving to bayonet mount, and in consequence seem to have forever lost their market position. Canon, by their willingness to abandon legacy support (perhaps a lesson from the RF days) and the embrace of new technology managed to regain their market position, and more.
Barry, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, or personally, and I'm exposing my own gullibility and feature-anxiety: a photographic need often isn't universal. In fact a photographic need may be very specialized and seldom needed. But in marketing, such needs become major drivers. And I'd say, appropriately so, for the SLR indeed aspires to be the universal, most widely adaptable, camera configuration ever.
But where it bites us: we talk ourselves to upgrade after upgrade, to move up the model ladder, simply because of this feature or that (no, not exclusively so, but being honest here, yeah, I chase features and gimmics and things that at worst complicate the camera, at best are useful only on occasion)...
And there are always people who will in no uncertain terms defend or justify the absolute necessity of any given feature or performance item. We are all in danger of seeming foolish yokels amongst real photographers
That said, 'the market' doesn't necessarily move in sync with purely photographic values. Some excellent designs will be duds, and some mediocrities will light up the sales figures...
(I've leveraged my daughter's becoming a photo major + some gift dollars for 25 years of corporate survival into what I think are the rational cameras in the current SLR market: K-30 and D600. The D600 is an experiment in seeing what Nikon is all about, and the full frame part of it is just me taking advantage of the one time in the near term I would go for such an expensive camera, plus all my legacy Nikkors bought with half a mind to eventually use on digital.)