If I had more time and money I certainly would!
> Also, is the RAW data specific to the device and if so, why?
To maximize battery life, the hardware does zero processing on the image data; it simply copies the raw pixels output by the image sensor to the unformatted SD card.
> If the device simply used, say, DNG or TIFF, then decoding could be done by external software, and all your own software would have to do would be to read the SD card and produce RAW files...?
True, perhaps I should've used an existing RAW format like DNG and exposed the images as a filesystem. That would require using a different architecture (ie not using an MSP430, like Rinzler89 suggested), and would likely reduce the battery life due to having to maintain a filesystem on the SD card.