Spot on assessment. Economics — sunk costs — are the issue.
If your employer owns a locker full of bodies and lenses, transitioning to anything else is difficult. Hopefully, the Canon and Nikon adapters for their existing dSLR lenses will smooth the transition for some organizations and individuals. Others, like you and I, can justify the switch to mirrorless and are happy we made it.
Eventually, a tipping point will favor more rapid transition. Hopefully, those with significant quantities of bodies and lenses will unload them before they are worthless.
I remember the transition from optical film printers to digital mini-labs in the school portrait business I worked for back around 2000 to 2007. We bought film scanners (see below) and ripped out over 40 huge, $50,000 to $160,000 automatic package printers and four PAKO long roll paper processors, plus a few tons of other obsolete equipment. Lots of equipment had to be disassembled and sold as scrap to be recycled, rather than sold as used gear. Other labs were doing the same things we were!
I remember the subsequent transition from film cameras to digital cameras in 2002 to 2007. We had hundreds of $7500 to $12,500 long roll film cameras that were used for years to make millions of school portraits. Suddenly, in early 2005, a properly adjusted Canon EOS 20D was capable of emulating Kodak Portra 160 film well enough to let us switch over 400 photographers to digital capture from film capture.
The kicker? We couldn't find anyone who wanted the film cameras! We had to PAY about $75 each to have them disassembled and recycled! We also recycled nearly a million dollars worth of Kodak Bremson HR500 film scanners (used for only three to six years!) and associated equipment, plus millions of dollars worth of film processors, mixing tanks, optical printers, etc.
Paradigm shifts are like that. When people wake up and realize what they're missing, there is a mad rush to the new normal. Our whole market gradually woke up to the reality that they no longer wanted a package of school portrait prints, when they owned a smartphone connected to the Internet and a handful of social media accounts and photo sharing sites. Herff Jones saw it coming, and sold our photography division to Lifetouch. Now, Lifetouch is part of Shutterfly...
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