[Brightcolours]

We are indeed far from human vision's DR.

No, we are not. Our eye's DR is pretty low. Just when we look around, the brightness gets regulated by closing and opening the aperture. DR of RAW far outperforms our vision's DR. We have pretty contrasty vision. High DR has low contrast.

I just compared the DR between the Ricoh GR and the E-M1. The GR has indeed a bit more DR until ISO 200, then the MFT has the advantage.  Quite surprising given the sensor size difference.

However, it's probably not significant anyway.

DR is indeed important, but I personally don't like the look of HDR images at all. They look totally unatural to me. I think future cameras will be able to produce very high DR images by shooting (very quickly) the same scene at different EVs and automatically combine the different exposures in RAW.

What you are saying is clashing. HDR is high dynamic range tone mapped into a low dynamic range. That is why it looks unnatural. We can't see a high DR because our vision is contrasty with a low DR. We either perceive a high DR capture as totally bland and not contrasty, or when we adjust the tonal curve, we just see a part of the high DR in a contrasty way and the rest of the DR is lost in perceived white and perceived black.

 



 

This is an example I made to show what increased DR actually looks like. On the left, a normal contrasty DR quite natural (similar to how our vision "works"), of 8 or so stops. On the right what 14 stops look like. The only two ways to make high DR not bland is to put a steep tonal curve in (doing so limits the DR to 8 or so stops again) or by tonal mapping the high DR into low DR (8 stops again).