Sigh, endless debate repeated a thousand times a thousand places. I'm not sure what it is going to add to discuss it yet again... But fine, you asked some specific questions.
I can't understand this
so you are saying you would prefer to see the books cooked?
Problem one, right there, you interpret using a imaging system as it was intended to be used from the start as "cooked". So I know right away whatever I tell you won't change your mind. I will go back to the Diesel car analogy - if Car and Driver tested a Diesel Volkswagon Golf with unleaded gas their results really wouldn't be useful to their readers now would they?
you know, you can always improve the image made by the lens with stuff yourself (PTLens for instance) but if you get the data cooked well ... you don't know much about the lens then do you?
If you ignore the designers recommended processing you know even less about its performance, it is like ripping one optical element out of a lens and then testing it and trying to draw conclusions. This digital processing was part of the optics design from the start and is built in and unchangeable in the camera JPG pipeline as well as all commercial RAW converters, you rip it out you are essentially ripping out part of the optics design. It really is like prying the front element off a lens. Your test is now a classic case of garbage in garbage out. It is like the RF front end of cellphone - the analog section and filters were designed to complement the follow up DSP, testing one without the other leads to erroneous results, in fact your cellphone won't work at all.
perhaps you could explain why seeing the results of software corrected issues being more 'complete'
Because that was how the system was designed to be used from the very start. Optics design is a game of trade-offs. In film days you could only solve the problem optically. With DSLRs using OVFs you probably better get distortion corrected in the optics or framing is going to be a problem, but you can certainly could leave lateral CA to digital processing and you'd now have more design trade space to optimize other parameters. With an EVF you can leave distortion to post processing.
Now, what if I *don't* apply the corrections? Well, I measure more CA than the designer intended or most any user will actually see, I measure more distortion than the designer intended or most any user will actually see, I measure *higher* edge sharpness than the designer intended or most any user will see, and in many cases I measure *wider* FOV than the designer intended or most any user will see. All four of these test results are corrupted by not applying the corrections, two results get worse and two get better and these results are *not* what any user using industry leading commercial RAW converters or camera JPEGs will actually see in use nor are they what the designer optimized the lens for. So not how it was designed or used. How on earth is that useful or complete? The only people it is useful to is a tiny fraction of people who use RAW converters that don't support the corrections and then furthermore opt not to correct in PTLens afterwards - that is people who don't understand how the system was designed to work or actively choose not to use it that way. Oh, and people who like pretty block diagrams with everything neatly tucked in labeled boxes instead of being where optimal performance is achieved.
There, done, I see no point in discussing further. You can find endless discussions of this other places which always fall into two camps. Those who understand and accept that micro-four-thirds has taken a systems approach to their optics design, partitioning the problem into those elements best handled in the optics domain and those best handled in the digital domain. And then there are those who don't for a wide variety of difficult to fathom reasons.
Ken
P.S. Apologies if this sounds overly huffy. I spend so much of my career making sure people specify and test complicated processing systems properly that it gets tiresome and I tend to project that frustration on to this tiny aspect of the same thing that has shown up in my hobby! No offense please! The problem is on my end!