Yes, it seems to me, if we are to make this work the way we want, we don't want anyone who has showed up in the forum to try their hand at editing to be constrained to editing an 8 bit jpg. That seems like it would seriously limit what can be done. A DNG, or a 16 bit TIFF or something like that would seem to be required I would think, if there is some way to do that.
ML