As I look at the Zfc a little more closely, another thing struck me: with the camera body Nikon has made a reasonable (but not perfect) nod to the way things used to be. With lenses? Nope.
What stands out most is that Nikon doesn't have a single Z-mount lens with an aperture ring, not even the NOCT. Moreover, Nikon doesn't "click" the added control rings (as Canon does), and the focus-by-wire response on the focus rings feels all wrong for truly manual focus work. In other words, the camera feels "more manual and retro," but the lenses feel "too modern."
Put simply, the Zfc design is highly dissonant with the current Z-mount lens designs. This indicates that there is no top manager at Nikon who's forcing any consistency of design goals at Nikon. The body side of engineering decided to try a Fujifilm-style play to see if that gave them traction in the lower-end market, but the lens side of engineering never got that memo (or worse, ignored it).
One thing that could have helped a little would have been to produce a new lens adapter, call it the AITZ. No focus or aperture arm activation needed, just AI-S indexing with max aperture and focal length reporting back into the camera. Of course, this brings up the other dissonance in the Zfc: it's DX, not FX. All the older AI-S lenses that might benefit from such a new, simpler adapter are 1.5x the focal length that the user would actually want. (Note that you can use third-party "dumb" adapters to use old lens with aperture rings on the Zfc, but those adapters don't report any information to the camera.)
