I think you wanted to say before Panasonic decided to save some $$$...
because there were and are lenses designed for digital sensors before and now, w/o that huge amount of geometric distortion... take LX3 P&S for example - Samsung did a better job w/ lens (and faster and longer) in EX1/TL500 w/o that...
it is not that optimal... cheaper - yes.
Please. I know what I want to say, and that certainly isn't it.
With respect to the LX3 lens: it has corrections applied; and w.r.t. the LX3 and Samsung EX1 - these are P&S cameras with rather different design and performance parameters than the lenses for the G series.
Optimal is when you achieve outstanding performance by whatever means you can, and that implies total system performance. With film, the software corrections weren't available, and thus we had lesser performance because the optical designers had to make a lens that balanced all the performance lowering parameters, but could not produce a general purpose lens, ie, one that worked at many distances and over the whole visible spectral range that didn't show most of the aberrations to some degree.
With software correction we have much higher performance lenses.
Bringing in the cost into this argument is a red herring, because all manufacturers at all times have and will continue to reduce costs, whatever they produce.
In any case, yes, the software correction method of image correction is a fully valid and effective way of optimizing system image quality.
I have used and still have many lenses that do not rely on software correction to achieve very high image quality: Summilux 50mm ASPH, Summilux 21mm, Tri-Elmar 16-21mm, Canon 17mm TS-E, Apo Ronar 240 and 480mm, Photars from 25mm to 120mm, Biogon 38mm, etc.
All have some failing; the most noticeable common one is price. Other than that, in spite of their price and state of the art design, the Summilux 21 and the Tri-Elmar 16-21 have rather high distortion. The Canon 17 is huge and in the far corners has image quality falloff such that you really have to use f/11, the Apo Ronars are f/9 and the Biogon has a lot of vignetting and some softness in the corners compared with current designs. If the designers had software correction available for their imaging systems, they could have made lenses that produced higher quality images.
They could have optimized them.
In the end, optimization is not an absolute thing. The banding that is apparent in some instances will affect me less than you, it seems. To me, it's more important to have an optical system that is very sharp at all EI's and every picture due to excellent correction for most aberrations that affect image quality, and have distortion and CA 'fixed' in software than have a lens thats not that sharp wide open and in the corners, and has maybe 2% distortion but that renders more smoothly on the GH2 sensor at EI 5000 with the contrast and sharpness bumped high. And might cost me more.
Henning