Tang, David may know more about why the 3012R was discontinued. I think he was an SME dealer at the time. SME started out as the Scale Model Equipment company. It was founded by Alastair Robertson-Aikman (ARA), an audiophile and music lover, particularly of opera. His listening room was legendary. He was great friends with the head archivist at the Vienna State Opera and gave him a Model 30/12 for his 60th birthday. Many of the musicians in the Vienna Philharmonic have SME tables and arms. ARA ran a successful business, but I think his passion was music. I'm not sure that his main objective was "certainly different from ours".
ARA wanted a new tonearm for his own use, one that was better than what was then available. His engineers designed one, ARA and his music friends thought it sounded great, and it was developed into a commercial product. The rest is history. I presume SME wants to make money. However, with an audiophile at the helm, and other, non-audio customers providing the business with steady income, it is not clear to me that one can conclude that the newer V arm and its descendants were developed just to increase profits. I don't understand how this idea got started. Is it not also possible that SME wanted to meet a new demand in the market and improve their current products? The older arms were selling very well. I think in part that the new arms were a response to the newer moving coil cartridges, and David said something about the new, lighter, suspended turntables which were becoming popular having an influence on the design of these arms.
Remember too that the 3012R and V arms were sold concurrently, at least for a short while. It is possible that at least some of their engineers were not of "different eras". There was an overlap between the arms. I don't know if one or more of the engineers were involved with both arms or not, but without knowing the details, I think we should refrain from some of these assumptions.
I am curious. Have you no interest in hearing the V-12 arm in your system? You own many arms and duplicates, and you seem to want variety of sound and enjoy comparisons. Now that you own a 3012R and are aware of SME, are you not at least a little bit curious about how their current flagship arm would sound in your system? I get that you and the others who own the 3012R like it a lot. But for some reason, no one seems even interested in trying the new SME arm in one of these excellent systems on a non SME turntable. Perhaps everyone has heard that David does not like the V arm. However, relative to some of the other $12K-$30K arms out there, the V and V-12 are relative bargains. Many early photos of the AF1 and the Kronos even show V-12 arms mounted on them. The new TechDAS V table has two V arms mounted on it for the publicity photo.
Someone suggested in this thread that much of the V arm is about marketing. The box does indeed have the rather bold statement: "The best pick up arm in the world." It seems to me that their marketing is not so great because the new arms seem to be dismissed and not even considered by the very high end audiophiles. With the exception of a few vintage arm designs, this subset of our hobby seems to focus on more expensive tone arms and SME is no longer one of the really expensive arms. SME does not advertise much in the US, and yet there top tables are backordered, so there seems to be a lot of demand. Perhaps there is just no buzz about the brand. In typical British fashion, the company is understated. They sell a lot of product, so they don't advertise much. One thing is for sure. SME is not a couple of guys in a garage selling a few products a year.