but with a 4K screen, you have three options: 1. no scaling and tiny fonts (ugh), 2. fractional scaling (ugh), or 3. 2x scaling and settle for 1080p real estate (ugh)

IMO 5K > 1440p > 4K > 1080p

Have you ever switched from a high refresh rate screens to a 60 Hz screen and noticed a difference? I find this to be similar.

The products basically don't exist.

I can get some rather fantastic 1440p displays -- HDR, 165Hz, DCI-P3 color gamut, and excellent color reproduction (especially when calibrated) for as cheap as $260 on sale. Best thing imaginable? No, but amazing for the price, and objectively better in every measure than the 1440p displays that were $1000+ in 2010.

I'd pay $2000 -- perhaps even $2500 -- each (and I'd buy THREE), for a 5K display that met my requirements.

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Hardware Unboxed recently made a video complaining that the display market is too heavily driven by gamers wanting a specific, narrow feature set for a rock bottom price.

Display makers have delivered that. However they don't really make much of anything else as a result.

It's a nasty, difficult, low-margin business where almost no one is making money, hence why it's huge volumes of largely the same thing with no major shifts forward.

The bigger issue than low margins is the "4k" marketing and lack of large buyers other than Apple for 5k displays. I think early on in the 4k hype train, there was a bandwidth issue with Display port that required MST for 5k.

Unfortunately 200+PPI are extremely expensive. So 5K panel at 27"+ are partially speaking an Apple only SKUs.

Can you elaborate?

5/4 = 1.25

Since they are both the same aspect ratio (16:9) you can also take the ratio of one linear dimension and square it to get the area ratio.

So:

(5120/3840)^2 = (2880/2160)^2 = 1.777

4k is 4096 x 2160, 5k is 5120 x 2880

There's also a really helpful diagram on that page

(5120 × 2880) / (4096 × 2160) = 1.6666