I don't understand how the Multi-Interface shoe is "Industry Standard"

The parts of the Minolta shoe look stronger to me, but neither of us has any actual test or engineering data. I just challenged you to produce evidence.

I think Sony made a mistake doing away with the Minolta shoe, which served well for almost a quarter century. They apparently did so to placate whiners and novices who couldn't understand why Sony didn't look like their friends' Canikons and other me-too cameras.

Sony has discarded other great things it inherited from Minolta, like the FF A900 DSLR, and the multiple dedicated controls of the KM 7D. It has replaced them with gimmicky designs which stress optimization for video.

Sometimes it is best to throw away bad and outmoded legacy technology, even when it costs us in the short run. After all, we don't still demand floppy disk drives in computers.