Another thing that would greatly "extend" the usability of these cameras in professional environments would be a solution on how to get a faster refresh at the same time the ability to see proper framing in the higher resolution of crop modes.
With a lot of shooters getting all excited with these new 4K cameras, having a "free" working 2K-2.5k cam already in your hands would make you think twice if the difference is worth it.
Right now, using crop modes would be limited to locked down shots.
You can frame, hit info for fast refresh, do some short moves, pan or tilt, but at that point framing would be guesswork.
I'm no coder, but somehow if in 1X mode a black crop/frame shows whats recorded, perhaps somehow the camera can be "tricked" not to magnify/zoom and allow cropped3x recording. I really don' know if that is technically possible.
or perhaps via HDMI? That through hdmi a whole view of the sensor is shown while the camera records in crop mode, that way we can just mask out the area recorded area.
Again, I'm just throwing ideas out here with no technical basis whatsoever, purely speculation.