One thing people ask me is where we are in Nikon's transition from DSLR to mirrorless. My answer tends to surprise them: we're fully in the mirrorless era now.
As if to emphasize that, the French site Phototrend published an article describing what the Canon, Nikon, and Sony professional services had brought to the Paris Olympics. For Nikon, it looks like this:
Look closely at those numbers (orange is DSLR, blue is mirrorless): 6.7% DSLR bodies, 93.3% mirrorless bodies. While I won't graph it, a similar situation occurred with lenses, though F-mount lenses did a little better than F-mount bodies, mainly because lenses like the 120-300mm f/2.8E don't exist in the Z-mount yet (I'm stunned that Nikon didn't have something ready in this space, as that's perhaps the most common focal lengths used, and you need fast apertures, as some of the venues depend too much on natural or already existing light and I'm hearing from my friends already that the lighting is subpar in many venues).
If the Nikon-using professionals and agencies covering the Olympics were mostly bringing their DSLRs with them, they'd want way more DSLR support than what Nikon NPS brought to Paris.
The above data tracks well with my observations about Nikon-using pros: once they saw the advantages of mirrorless and the Z9 came out, almost all of them moved within the next year.
I've gotten a lot of pushback on one thing I've written that relates to this in a parallel manner: that Nikon's biggest issue with the Z System is that it has nothing specific to offer the remaining D70, D80, D90, D7xxx (and even D3xx/D500) users. As far as I can tell, the biggest Nikon-owning group that hasn't already moved to mirrorless lives in this middle-ground space. Their current choices are to essentially downgrade to a Z50/Zfc, or to move to full frame via a Z5/Z6/Zf. Most of the ones that I talk to who are still in this category believe that neither choice is enough to get them to open up their wallets. Also, many who did decide to move to mirrorless ended up with a Fujifilm, OMDS, or Sony body, because Nikon doesn't make what they want.
Nikon needs a better plan in the current DX/FX gap. And yes, they also need to move more F-mount lenses to Z-mount (e.g. 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5, 16mm f/2.8, 120-300mm f/2.8E and 180-400mm f/4E TC, all of which are needed at an event such as the Olympics but required an FTZ this time around).
