hardware vs software color war???

hardware/colorant standards only???

first things first, I have learned that "good enough" is sometimes
preferred over perfection

I forgot an early teaching of a good boss I had when I was doing C-41
chemistry, that you could take any two of the three:
quality
cost
time

it is obvious for the life of consumer imaging that cost and time
prevail, and this applies to some professional applications too,, but
even consumer imaging requires some SOFTWARE applications like scene
balance algorithms so that edits to view or print are minimal, even
though cell phones have easy to learn editing as I have scene my family use

so how far do hardware/colorant standards go like SWOP, sRGB,
ProPhotoRGB, etc. ?

SWOP began to die with Adobe Postscript Level 2 and their SOFTWARE
standards like color rendering dictionaries (CRD) , then ICC killed it
with SOFTWARE device independent color (CIE) and image
portability/encoding/storage

it is just as easy to use an ICC profile as a CRD, but a little harder
to make one if you want the quality, when I worked at Kodak some of our
color measurement instruments cost into six figures ($100,000 or more)

their will come a time when hardware advances that the ICC SOFTWARE will
be less of a burden, sort of like when java is going to mature and the
patents Oracle has expires, who would not choose java and device
independence/portability over C++? Same argument for images, you get
some some additional cost over time with device independent/portable color

If I was a betting man I would wager that open systems of
hardware/colorants have even suffered at this point

frankly I think that time was when sRGB was being suggested after SWOP
died, almost 20 years ago (I complained on Kodak's ICC internal mailing
list) too many hardware/colorant jobs would go, guess people have to
work, software is less manpower intensive, that is a choice of cost
above, when the time for java comes and it happens before color, color
will come quickly, even for the consumer applications in that
maintaining multiple software standards would be a higher cost choice