Photolab is a complete fail if you don’t have a supported camera.
Other photo software allows one to use DNGs converted from that camera’s raw before official support of the camera becomes available.
Yes, one would need official support to make effective use of some features, like lens corrections. But do we really need to wait if all we want to do is use some denoise and a crop? The net result is that I no longer use Photolab with a new camera, and move to other solutions. And once Photolab is out of my workflow, I am finding I don’t use it for my older camera body either.
That is actually news to me. I did not know that you could not use dng files for unsupported cameras. I suppose it has to do with the inability of PL to be able to do automatic lens corrections as it can not do that if it does not have a profile for the camera/lens being used.
However I do agree with you. You should be able to use it without the distortion correction if you choose, and I do not know why they would not allow this, given that you would not care about the corrections.