I don't have the D-Lux 8, but from carefully reading reviews, I've gathered up the following differences from the prior D-Lux 7 and LX100/LX100 II models (in no particular order):
Better viewfinder, OLED instead of field sequential.
Brighter LCD display.
Leica menu system, most reviewers say it's much clearer, simpler than before.
Leica designed body, different dimensions than previous LX100 based design models.
Some of the controls have been redesigned.
Leica processor instead of Panasonic processor
USB-C port
There might be other changes as well that I'm not aware of.
So, I'd say there are quite a few incremental improvements to the camera over the prior models and therefore, the D-Lux 8 is not simply a re-badged LX100.
Of course, you may think otherwise.
I don’t
This very much isn’t a rebadged LX100. What I said was that
“This isn’t a facelift, it’s a major re-engineering of the camera—but its surface rather than its insides.”
Of all the points you list, only one is related to the technical image-making capability (and even then I think only JPEGs), which is the Leica rather then Panasonic image processor. But that was equally true of the D-Lux 7, so it’s null and void when comparing the 8 to the 7.
The point that I was making, and which your list reinforces, is that compared to the D-Lux 7 there is absolutely no material change to its technical capability, but there is a huge change to the user interface (hard and soft: from the EVF to the menus to everything else). That’s extremely unusual; in fact I can’t think of a single camera successor that has followed that approach before. It’s arguably a sign that improvements to spec sheets are less important (at the upper end of the market at least) than improvements to the user experience.
(By the way, you did miss one thing: the D-Lux 8 has no step zoom, which personally I think is a dealbreaker for a fixed-lens zoom, as it no longer qualifies as a “bag of primes”.)
