I’m also an old museum worker and I also have used DNG privately during some years but I don’t anymore.
Adobe created DNG and Lightroom is the RAW- converter that by far has the best DNG-support.
The problem with DNG and Photolab is not the DNG-file format in itself at all. Instead the problem is that Photolab has a file read control that always checks if the camera models files you are using are supported. Even if you have converted a file to DNG Photolab will only open the ones that have profile support in Photolab.
Last year I bought a new Sony A7IV and got problems right away and I continued to have problems for six month. Capture One and Lightroom fixed support in a couple of month but not DXO. I also have the older A7 III.
I also know from experience way back around 2006 or 2007 with the same problem in other converters that had the same issues. So I tried to fool that control in Photolab using a HEX-editor. So I took an A7IV file and just gave it the same code as the A7 III files use to have and sim-sala-bim I got in. So it’s not about the RAW-format itself at all necessarily but about the version codes written in four places in the files. In the meantime when I was waiting for DXO to fix the problem I batch converted my new files with a macro tool that I used to call the HEX-editors search and replace function.
I’t gets even more weird. When I had fooled the file control so I got in and could edit the files, I was able to select ANY of all the camera profiles in Photolab. I could for example select the Canon 5D MK IV profile (that gave me a starting point with slightly more unsatured colors) and use that instead. THAT was possible to do but I was refused to open an ARW A7IV file and change the profile later. What is the logic in that?
I can also tell you that this A7 III profile hat is there to give me a better starting point when starting my work with A7III files, worked so good even with the new unsupported files that I couldn’t see any differences later when DXO gave us profiles even for the A7IV files some months later.
We are several people with new Sony, Nikon and Canon bodies that have asked DXO to get rid of the file control during 2022 or at least to give us a chance to override it and open our files without having any explicit support for these files.
Read this message if you are intrested in by passing the file read control with files from new cameras