It may come as a surprise to some that a lot of industrial computer vision is done in grayscale. In a lot of industrial CV tasks, the only things that matter are cost, speed, and dynamic range. Every approach we have to making color images compromises on one of those three characteristics.

I think this kind of thing might have real, practical use cases in industry if it's fast enough.

Ah, I think you work in the same industry as me, machine vision. I completely agree with you, most applications use grayscale images unless it’s color-based application.

Which vision library are you using? I’m using Halcon by MVTec.

Also resolution & uniformity

Color makes major compromises physically also, since it seems like the Red, Green and Blue channels are sampling from the same physical location but the actual sensor buckets are offset from each other.