It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop
ever again?" type of product.
Nah. Lightroom is/was the primary Adobe product I used. Pretty much the only new features they've ever introduced that meant anything to me revolved around supporting new cameras. At $80 for a perpetual license it was great because I rarely upgrade my camera bodies. Aside from supporting new cameras the only other worthwhile to me feature Adobe's introduced was a 64-bit installer. Yeah, LR 4.4 was a 64-bit app, but the installer remained 32-bit because Adobe is that lazy or greedy.
None of that justifies renting the newer versions from Adobe. Were I using LR professionally I'd just have buy something capable of running Windows 7 and keep it air gapped instead of upgrading.
Sadly, as bad as Adobe is, they still way ahead of the competition. Some come close with photo editing capabilities, but nothing touches Lightroom for library management. DxO comes with a rootkit (and has for years). DarkTable and Raw Therapee suffer the open source curse of mediocre (yet strongly opinionated) user experience.
None of that justifies renting the newer versions from Adobe. Were I using LR professionally I'd just have buy something capable of running Windows 7 and keep it air gapped instead of upgrading.
Sadly, as bad as Adobe is, they still way ahead of the competition. Some come close with photo editing capabilities, but nothing touches Lightroom for library management. DxO comes with a rootkit (and has for years). DarkTable and Raw Therapee suffer the open source curse of mediocre (yet strongly opinionated) user experience.