That’s a valid point; at the end of the day it’s about simulating our SDR look.
However, what I think differentiates this circumstance is that it might reasonably be the default/base look that is widely used, unlike the LMT’s provided for backwards compatibility/comparison. One of the discussions a couple meetings ago was how a fair number of people use ACES simply because “it works”; the necessity of using a default LMT to get a base look, but only when doing HDR, convolutes the workflow.
These will all have to be re-developed for ACES 2.0 anyway since we are changing the OT (including rendering), do they not?
The inverse is also true, though, that SDR would look like HDR. So in the case of a production doing an HDR master first, the SDR grade should be a simple trim pass (and possibly not even needed in some circumstances). If the “standard” HDR OT looks wildly different from the SDR OT, best case scenario there is an LMT that gets it close and do final tweaks from there, but worst case you’re doing a full grade again in SDR.
Just throwing it out there, but maybe this is better as a both/and approach. There are two HDR transforms available: one that “matches” the SDR OT and one that is less restrictive. There is ALSO an LMT available that can be used with the less restrictive HDR OT to match the SDR look. This would be comparable to say rendering directly in 0.1.1 versus using an LMT and rendering in the current version. Both should yield the same (or very similar) results, but either can be used depending on workflow.