Hello Bruce -
One of the goals of ACES was to simplify interchange and archiving of scene-linear images. To do this, there was a need for a standard (or reference) rendering. Without that, experience has shown that the process is ambiguous (i.e. “what LUT was I supposed to look at this through?”).
If we left it up to the colorist as you suggest, then there would be no standard and if you received an ACES image you would also need to receive a LUT (for example) to know what the creative intent was.
As to whether the contrast of the RRT (and ODT, because they both affect the contrast) is too high or too low, this was something that was validated by many very experienced industry professionals in a carefully setup projection environment. That said, I would imagine that the ACES Next effort will take a fresh look at those tests. It may be that there are differences between how the images were viewed during the engineering work and how people such as yourself are viewing them in practice.
I have to disagree with your statement about how Photoshop works. In Photoshop you are working with images that are either rendered by the digital camera vendor or rendered by Adobe in the Camera Raw module. Working with unrendered images in Photoshop would be difficult – the tools have other expectations.
thanks for the feedback,
Doug Walker
Autodesk