Anyone annoyed that the Nikon D5100 camera will NOT autofocus with some Nikon lenses?

This is not true....20 new lenses available on Nikon's website are non AFS lenses. While it is true that all new designs will incorporate AFS, Nikon still sells plenty of new lenses that are not AFS. If you include manual focus lenses you can add another dozen to the mix. A very healthy percentage of new Nikon lenses are not AFS. And as the OP discovered, many of these are specialty lenses such as defocus control (DC), perspective control (PC, PCI), fish-eye. Most of these have not AFS equivalent. And the lenses that do have AFS equivalents are almost always much more expensive (80-200 2.8, 50 1.8 etc.). The only exception to the price difference appears to be the 35mm prime where the AFS is cheaper than the AFD.

Your 20 year time line is reasonable. The only problem is that we are not 20 years out yet. Nikon still sells these lenses. They are still an important part of the Nikon line up. As stated above, Nikon hasn't even gotten around to redesigning a good 30 or 40 percent of their line up. It will be years still before all of these lenses will have been redesigned. Then, and only then, could Nikon reasonably begin to consider phasing out the focus motor. To do so now (really years ago with the D40) was little more than a money grab.

Yes it did. It was a despicable money grab at the expense of it's customer base. The bean counters at Canon were correct in their calculation that the increased revenue would outstrip the lost revenue of the few that jumped ship. Hurray for them! I'm sure Nikon took notes and referenced them when they decided to screw over their own customers in this manner.

Just as long as they can find other creative ways to cheat customers out of value. It doesn't have to be a changing of the mount....they can abandon ittl support just as they did with dttl support (I would have hated to have been the last SB80DX buyer before they announced the SB800), they could eliminate VR support, they could change the AFS to some new AFX motor....etc. Point is, they can obsolete previous technology at a whim and have proven themselves capable of this decision. Yet there are hoards of Nikon fans who are quick to forgive and forget.

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eddyshoots