In defense of the the 18-55 and 16

At the risk of sounding like a Sony employee (which I am not), I felt I should say that to get the best out of the 16mm one does not need to resort to zone focus as you suggest. In fact, with the advent of automatic focus do people still use zone focus? I think probably not. Nor, as I hope I demonstrate above, is the 16mm user limited to f8. I hope the attached further makes my point: