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I get what you’re saying Paul and I understand where you’re coming from there but it still comes back to inherent dynamic range.
With a well depth of 65k and 8e- read noise the sensor itself whether it be 14-bit or 16-bit ADC has about 13 stops of dynamic range. That’s it’s bottleneck. You are right that a 16-bit ADC would allow for a more accurate (near 1/1) reading of e-/ADU but there is what you could consider as 3 stops of dynamic range inaccuracy; that’s the read noise.
I’ve done some testing on a spreadsheet and the difference between 14-bit and 16-bit ADC after stacking more than a handful of exposures becomes less than one electron, it’s less than flat fielding errors, less than photon shot noise, potentially less than dark current.
In a single exposure there is likely to be more error introduced during calibration than error caused by the ADC.
Remember, if a 16-bit ADC outputs a value of 12,001 then a 14-bit will be 12,000. 12,345 becomes 12,344. 13,522 becomes 13520/13524.
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