Tim, my interest in all of this is mostly just intellectual curiosity. I'm far too casual a photographer to care for any practical purposes.
I'm convinced that lossy raw can cause some issues with A7RII files. I've seen a bunch of examples of this. I'm
not sure if what Lloyd is pointing out with orange peel or posterization represents an issue with the Sony lossy compression, the raw support, the camera settings affecting raw, or something else. I'm interested to dig and learn more.
Again, I couldn't care less for the purposes of my own photography. I didn't care about my Fuji X10 orbs, my Nikon D600 oil spots, or my M240 banding. None of this stuff bothers me. I do have a
longstanding bias towards keeping raw as raw as possible, but that's just an ideal for me.
\But my understanding is that Lloyd had processed it differently to how Iliah assumed he had processed it, with Lloyd cognisant of the gamut issues, and still got posterisation.
It's very clear from the DPR thread that Iliah reproduced Lloyd's findings and found that the bulk of the posterization "damage" happened when going from Pro Photo RGB to Adobe RGB. This doesn't mean that Lloyd processed it wrong or was not cognizant of gamut issues (though he omitted discussion of their contribution until his second blog post).
There's only one way to convert to Adobe RGB in Lightroom. The methods Iliah mentions which could have prevented the bulk of the "damage" involve specific manipulations during Photoshop soft proofing, manipulations that few of us would do. So it is simultaneously predominantly a color gamut issue as well as a real issue contributed to by raw format, according to Iliah.