That’s why I started this thread on whether we are trying to align to how film reproduced images, or how our eyes see a scene. I am not a color scientist (yet 
) but I’m nearly certain these are not the same goal. More than likely we will end up somewhere in the middle, but right now I have no idea what our target is.
I got mildly intelligent and decided to look at the original R3D file for red Christmas instead of making inferences off the renders. Simply backing off the exposure in Red Cine-X I get this:
which I believe backs up my theory that their faces are simply lit red. I guess I’m trying to wrap my head around how we deal with gamut compression (maybe volumetric compression is more accurate?) vs. a “path to white” and how/when it changes. I think this will depend heavily on our chosen aesthetic target.
I couldn’t find the original camera file for the blue bar, but I was hoping to pixel peep at it and see what the values are for some of those highlight areas just to see what is going on.