I've noticed this too and I have a pet theory about why.
It all comes back to the Canon 5DMk2. The Mk2 was an industry first: integrating video into a full frame sensor in an affordable body. It was an enormous hit. An entire generation of filmmakers grew up using the Mk2 and doing shots that were basically impossible on movie making equipment in the same price range. It made entire movies possible.
The problem is this: Canon also makes extremely high margin movie cameras and lenses. This equipment costs a lot more (and is probably what you want for a full production but I digress) and Canon makes a lot more on it. My impression is that the Mk2 killed an entire segment of Canon's product line and scared the shit out of them.
Since then, Canon has been extremely careful to roll out video features on prosumer cameras (like the Mk2) cameras slowly. They will only support lower quality video codecs on these cameras. They have made a new line of cheap-er video-first cameras.
I think that when the camera makers cannibalized their own products, a common move in smart devices, they got incredibly scared and ran away. The only one really making moves in this area is Sony and that's because Sony has nothing to lose - they had no business when they started making their name by releasing cameras with a lot of tech. Even so, they are not very good.
>Imagine how many iPhones Apple would sell if the sensor were not much changed from the 6s and the camera software not changed at all.
Honestly, very little of the advances in cell phone cameras since the 6s have come from sensors; it's all computational. We're up against the brick wall that is photon noise.
Finally, the A6600 is very much not a flagship. The A9 II is the flagship, at three times the price ($4500).
And as is typical one ends up with a half-assed solution that will stop working in 2 years when Apple/Google change some API or the app isn't maintained any more.
No matter how awesome it seems at launch and how good the quality, anything relying on smartphones is basically disposable.
It's hard to go back to a regular (non-upgrading) car after driving a Tesla, for example. If some camera maker realises that software is just as important as hardware, and continuously upgrades one model for 5 years, including tight integration with apps, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
What did livery owners do when the car came? They closed shop is my guess.
I don't really think there is much the camera companies could do. They've tried making it so you can use your camera from your phone. It's too cumbersome. They've tried making it so you can post images directly from the camera to the various services. Again too cumbersome. I have my phone always. I rarely have my camera. They've added apps stores to their cameras. They've added APIs. No one cares, it's not enough. Except for a few pros they're just not something anyone needs anymore.
If by "serious" you mean "studio," then you're probably right.
But there are plenty of "serious" photographers that find geotagging very useful. Newspaper photographers, travel photographers, scientific photography, etc...
Battery life is a general problem for GPS but if I can have GPS on a watch I’m not sure it would drain a big DSLR camera battery all that much.
how often does Sony release new APS-C sensors?
Still, Apple discovered a user problem—stringing together multiple apps to create a one-step process—and is trying to solve it. Are the camera companies doing the same? Doesn't seem like it.
So for now I can only dream about the camera that lets me load some variables into the EXIF data of an image (hashtags, caption, destination, resize choice, priority) while shooting, pushes that over to my phone via something like SnapBridge, and then because that phone app supports Shortcuts, allows me to say "Hey Siri, Output Images with Priority 1." Plus, when I get home be able to say to my computer "Hey Siri, Archive all Images."
Camera makers have done some half-assed wifi, Bluetooth, and NFC integrations with smartphones, but for the most part the camera still lives on its own, still uses out-of-date SoCs, and generally behaves like the year is 2005, not 2019. The various cameras I've used aren't even smart enough to do simple things like transfer a selected image to a given social network whenever the camera gets within range of a wifi access point it knows. And almost none of the camera makers seem to be serious about working on this problem. It's like Sony missing the iPod (a useful analogy because Sony is in the camera industry and, apart from its imaging sensor division, has missed the wave yet again).
Edit I forgot to add that I believe Sony just introduced a new $1400 flagship camera, the a6600. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/6975583891/sony-a6000-a610.... It has a 4-5 year old sensor in it and software that is even older. Kitted out from scratch with high quality lenses, it's probably $2,500 – $3,000. Imagine how many iPhones Apple would sell if the sensor were not much changed from the 6s and the camera software not changed at all.