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The idea would be that human vision is more responsive to ligh intensity than color intensity, and so, to optimize a display medium, we can use more bits for lightness and less for other color information. And to do that, we need a color space that treats lightness as a separate coordinate.

Secondly, designers need a color space that conforms more naturally to human vision.

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I think we should be doing most of this math in floating point, so it's not about optimizing numbers of bits (modern buses are getting fast enough to send 12 or 16 bits per channel per pixel to the display, so we don’t really need to optimize bandwidth there either necessarily), but mostly about helping everyone (designers, photographers, regular people) use models which are related to the way we see, rather than computer reproduction technology.

We could attempt to use an "unbound" version of a color sistem (i.e. RGB with -inf..+inf ranges rather than 0-255 for each channel). Even if the display medium can only handle a limited band of colors, more color information may be useful (like in HDR).

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