It’s primarily a comfort thing, and in the case of Flame also a function of many old color tools sticking around that predate ACEScg. If you use a tool that was designed for log footage on a linear color space it will be harder than it has to be.
Do consider that Baselight’s primary operator ‘Basegrade’ actually converts all color to linear internal and then back. So you can only work in linear. The Baselight ‘X-Grade’ operator does something similar for color, converting to a proprietary Lab style color space for similar reasons. As does the HDR tool in Resolve.
One big advantage of doing color in linear with appropriate operators is that you can shift the entire image up and down in f-stops, and even have a scale for it. The toe doesn’t necessarily get stuck at the bottom either. If you watch it on the scopes, you can see the entire image shifting up and down intact, you can stretch with contrast per channel or in whole. It actually can make multiple color operations a lot simpler and easier to visualize on scopes. Having a functional f-stop scale would even allow you to dial in accepted contrast ratios such as 3:1 (male portraits, business) if you want to get fancy.
In the end it’s what you know and are used to, and also how the tools have evolved. Flame color is great, but also mysterious in ways.
Your Flame experience will vary based on whether you use Color Corrector or Mastergrade, or yet other options.
