It’s because the viewing format has a fairly consistent gamma curve relative to viewing environment ambient light level. In a theater its about 2.6 and this works with no ambient light, and in a living room its about 2.4 with dim lighting, and on a computer screen its about 2.2 with typical office lighting. With controlled lighting, the perception of the output image under these three different gammas will be identical. This gives graders a great deal of precision. They can calibrate their screen and studio to appear exactly as it should to these idealized environments. That a number of people watch content in non-ideal environments is irrelevant (even though its often brought up as a strawman argument against consistent working environment viewing conditions).
With photography, you don’t have that control at all because traditionally photography was about prints. Every printer (regardless of kind) had to be profiled and you needed an explicit ICC conversion process for it to work. If you are solely publishing photographs digitally and have no intention of printing, you actually could adopt a film workflow and it would be just fine.
In short, film production doesn’t actually need the added complexity of ICC profiling. They could adopt it, but it’s not strictly necessary. Trouble comes when people don’t understand the fundamental reason why gamma correction and different primary spaces exist in the first place.
It depends what you want to apply your linear functions on. If you want to work directly in the source scene light (e.g. photography), then it would make sense to use the inverse OETF. If you are blending graded scenes of emissive light, i.e. a movie, then using the EOTF makes sense. The reason for this is that movies are graded with that EOTF in mind, so by linearizing with that EOTF, you get a resulting linear value as it is intended to be seen by a viewer.
Regardless of what you use for a linearizing function, the more important thing is that you use the correct encoding function afterward, so that you don’t introduce any additional gamma correction. For example, it was common to use a simple squaring function for speed. This gives fairly good results as long as you apply the square root function afterward to restore the original gamma correction. It doesn’t matter if the source is 2.2 or 2.4 gamma encoded or something else, that correction will be preserved. The blending post-linearization will be less accurate, but much better than not linearizing at all.
It is. The EOTF wasn’t an engineered function in 1996, it was the natural response of CRTs. The EOTFs of later technologies like LCDs were developed to approximate this response, not to be an inverse of the encoding gamma.
It’s not for tax reasons. It’s for legal reasons. You can’t escape taxes just by putting your headquarters in a certain location, but where your registered agent is controls your jurisdiction for disputes.
That’s not what happened. The phosphors chosen for CRTs were pretty much unchanged from the late 80s through the end of the CRT era. There were minor differences in formulation, but often that was at the expense of color accuracy for motion clarity.
The early LCDs were poor because of limitations of the backlight’s spectrum. Once LED backlights were introduced, this was no longer a problem.
It’s independent of white point. The metamerism problem is fundamental to the methodology of the 2° XYZ colorspace because it doesn’t model the entire real response of the human eye. Instead it underestimates the response of the blue cone. This can lead to blue becoming purple as Y is reduced. This is because the experiment used lamps with colored filters (broadband light) and not lasers or LEDs (narrowband light).
It’s not just a matter of introducing a correction factor (although that exists, see Judd-Vos) because the solution is more complex than that. The practical take away is that color matching cannot just involve comparing a narrow point in isolation but also needs to have a baseline of controlled surround and specular reflections in addition to understanding the nature of the perceived color (reflective, emissive, narrowband, wideband, etc.).