That is completely the wrong thinking. There is no ‘possibility’ of a weakness in AMaZE’s diagonals. Emil has already confirmed that AMaZE does indeed produce diagonal ringing artifacts, and I showed to him the same examples as I showed here. There is no dispute there. I am not using Focus Magic to help myself see where the artifacts are, I use it to help others see where the artifacts are, and then tell them to see it again without sharpening, because that it much harder to see.
By avoiding artifacts as early as possible in the workflow, one is able to edit images more robustly, and enlarge them further than otherwise possible. I make large prints of my work, and I do not want to limit myself unnecessarily on how large I can go. The artifacts are not inherent to the camera, just how the data is interpreted (DCB does not have such artifacts, but has other problems). So it seems maybe this can be resolved.
There are so many flaws to this kind of thinking, it would be difficult to address each issue without digressing from this thread with several thousands of words.
The problem is not knowing where to look, and not knowing what to look out for. Here is a crop from Jacek’s DSC4042.NEF file, which clearly shows the diagonal ringing. No sharpening, all settings zeroed except for 2 steps of false color supression, which did not change the artifacts visibly but got rid of the offending and distracting false color artifacts. You should be able to very clearly see the diagonal ringing along the roof’s edge in AMaZE, which is completely not present in the DCB. I added a helpful line overlay below the AMaZE crop to highlight where and how long the ringing width is. DCB was with enhancement activated - DCB without enhancement is horrible and unusable.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5AXKSbQEPuFNGg0cEc4UHlxenM
It is possible to see this in the crop I provide too, there is a green color on the edge of the DCB rendition. It is also on all the high contrast, thin edge details like in the fine branches you show. This is one of the issues I noted with DCB, when one has almost neutral-color edges. AMaZE gives the more correct color for the edge, especially in the roof edge (harder to say for sure in the fine branches). This green-bleeding artifact with DCB because of the way it interpolates green values (thanks for the explanation Jacek), is one reason I am not willing to switch to using DCB. I didn’t wish to cloud the already complicated thread with more issues. Already we have folks here (strangely) unwilling to accept Emil Martinec’s own admission that AMaZE does produce ringing diagonal artifacts and he wishes to resolve this if he can spare the time.