Ah, the new Lightroom CC! I was a happy, delighted, enthusiastic Lightroom user from the moment it originally came out and threw Aperture into the bin where it belongs. Lightroom was fast, brilliant to use, a fabulous wrapper around ACR and managed all the photo files perfectly.
It was, to me, as perfect a piece of consumer software that has ever existed.
The moment CC turned up, not only was it a cut-down version in terms of features, but the file management side was gone too, and this whole cloud functionality took over. A complete workflow change.
The main benefit that I found, ok, the only benefit, was that I was able to easily create web galleries for client approval etc. Everything else was gone. Lightroom Classic came back, kind of, but the direction of travel was fixed.
It took me years and years to finally get close to that one-stop-shop workflow, using Photo Mechanic and Capture One, both of which have gone subscription-based and offering close to zero value in return.
My strategy now, I shit you not, is to never ever perform a major upgrade on this Mac and hold out until all the root SSL certificates expire with my current setup.
We used to have such stable computing environments and now everything is a cloud-connected, exposed and defenceless security shitshow.