I agree, Godfrey. The software correction that I'm skeptical about is when lenses are knowingly made with large amount of distortion to make them smaller to correct the distortion in software, like in the case of the Panasonic 7-14mm and other tiny lenses. I know from experience that this doesn't work well. The images become reasonably sharp, but often flat and uninteresting. The modest corrections of lenses like the PanaLeica 14-50mm are in a totally different class and easy to live with.
IN the design of lenses that include mandatory software correction as a part of the design, it is often the case that using a design with more pronounced
simple aberrations in place of
complex distortions (for instance, 8% barrel distortion instead of 4% mustache distortion) produces better results because the complementary corrections are simpler and less lossy in nature.
"Flat and uninteresting" sounds like an image processing issue rather than a lens characteristic. I'd much rather have my initial capture rather flat in appearance with lots of data expressing all the variations in the scene to the limits of the sensor that I can then tune to suit my desires rather than having a more contrasty image that has already lost data in various ways. I don't expect that my exposures are exactly the way I want to render them as the lens sees them—I want the choices of what data to keep and what to lose when I do the rendering.
The biggest negative I see in lenses with software correction complements is when the corrections are poorly done and cause a level of smearing at the edges and corners of the frame. I don't know if this is the problem you're seeing with the Panasonic 7-14. I know it also produces some longitudinal aberrations on Olympus bodies that don't show up on Panasonic bodies ... likely a sensor tuning kind of problem IMO. I haven't heard of this with the Olympus M.Zuiko PRO 7-14mm, or how closely competitive it is on performance against the ZD 7-14/4 ED for FT SLR.
If you find a lens that produces final quality results to your satisfaction straight out of the camera that's a wonderful thing, and a time saver, but in essence such lenses are generally tossing away some data and limiting editability at least to some degree. This is the joy of using Leica, Zeiss, selected Nikkor, Olympus, Canon, etc lenses: you're preselecting a look and reducing the amount of rendering required, but at the same time you should also recognize that you're losing some measure of editability. In the film era, this was almost an essential thing for high quality results due to the limitations of editability in analog image processing, but with digital image processing there are a lot more options, making lenses that natively provide the rendering if not less desirable perhaps a bit less necessary.
I have found very little downside to the mFT lenses that were designed for complementary software correction in terms of final image output. I haven't had any experience using the 7-14mm lens either in FT or mFT form, but I'm just as happy with the mFT Summilux-DG 25mm f/1.4 ASPH as I was with the FT Summilux-D 25mm f/1.4 ASPH: the results are as near to identical as I can imagine the word being applicable for. And I am grateful for 1/2 the size and 1/3 the weight of the mFT version.
Olympus hasn't made an mFT replacement for the 11-22 in terms of quality and rendering yet to do a comparison on; I think that's my favorite FourThirds format lens of all at this point.
G