Here's what I don't get. According to online videos about the making of the Hobbit, the Epic cameras they're using have quite poor saturation, particularly for (ironically) red, resulting in a muted, dull look. But instead of grading the video in postproduction, Jackson's team is instead adding bright makeup and oversaturated props to compensate.
If I were buying 30 cameras from Red, I'd demand better.
I'm not really impressed with RED cameras either. They're cheaper than any other higher resolution digital cameras because they traded spatial resolution for bit-depth. Red returned to a bayer-filtered CMOS array, abandoning the higher quality 3CCD sensors. RED has marketed to the higher ups that feel they don't need to listen to digital video engineers about signal quality, and its worked. About the limitations of bayer filtering: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3370690
At the rental house that I use, I hear that the Arri Alexa gets more traffic than their stock of REDs. It makes sense that a powerhouse in the industry like Arri would be able to cater to moviemakers better than a newcomer that showed up making a lot of promises that they couldn't always honor.
If I were buying 30 cameras from Red, I'd demand better.