No, but a discussion is always good...
Presuming that advanced amateurs and entry level pros are in the majority going to prefer .jpg (which I don't agree with, BTW), exactly what damage would there have been in giving the RAW button the ability to toggle from RAW to .jpg, instead of just .jpg to RAW? This is a feature that seems to be pretty poorly thought out and implemented, although of course I am not party to the discussion that went on behind it.
I don't believe that anyone who describes themselves as an advanced amateur or entry level pro would be particularly scared of very, very simple post processing. If the idea of converting from RAW to .jpg, even without any adjustments, is intimidating, then something like cropping or adjusting levels would be truly frightening.
I mean, the camera comes with Pentax's Photo Browser software - all you have to do is bulk select all the RAW shots you took and then choose "extract JPEG".... Done!
That has nothing to do with those who say they PREFER to shoot in .jpg for various reasons. That's a matter of choice. The difference here is, the way the RAW button is set up, for the person who shoots RAW the majority of the time, the RAW button is useless.
If they can't or won't use and read the included software and manuals and see that bulk file format transformation is about a two click operation, then they're probably not going to have a lot of success with the camera to begin with. Certainly no more than if they had stuck to the point and shoot world - which is capable of producing some very fine imagery itself.
Furthermore, even if the firmware allowed the RAW button to be used by RAW shooters the same way it is set up for use by .jpg shooters, that wouldn't affect .jpg shooters in the slightest. They don't HAVE to shoot in RAW if they don't want to - they can stick with the default .jpg image capture the camera came with, and use the RAW button as it currently exists.
Well, I do something very similar to that every day I'm working in the field - pictures of wells, risers, injection tanks, headers, etc. Doesn't take long to fill up a 4 Gb card while shooting in RAW. So I don't have to imagine how long it takes to convert them to .jpgs - I know.
It goes something like this:
- Open Pentax Photo Browser and browse to folder holding RAW's
- Hit <Ctrl><A>; alternately go to Edit-->Select All
- Right click and from the drop down menu select "Extract .jpg"
Now, there's no image adjustment in that process. But I see no difference in having to adjust a RAW in postprocessing than having to adjust the same photo if it were a JPEG.
So, it doesn't take any time at all set up the conversion, and the computer does it very quickly - doing a bulk rename at the time if I so wish. I just happen to use the Pentax (Silkypix) software because that's what came with the camera, but there are numerous software solutions that will do bulk RAW --> JPEG conversion.
Given all of the above, I don't think arguing that RAW would be too complicated and conversion from RAW to JPEG takes too long holds a lot of water.
So... users should have to upgrade to a new camera instead of Pentax doing a firmware upgrade to fix this oversight? That makes about as much sense to me as making JPEG an afterthought in the new Pentax top end cameras using the rational that if people want JPEG they can just downgrade.
I can live without the RAW button doing anything useful. But if it would cycle between RAW and JPEG for RAW shooters, I would probably use it once in a while.