P: Ability to batch process Photo Merge (HDR and panorama)

Exactly! Please help us!

Please add HDR support to the plugin SDK API!  I would particularly love to see the ability to create an HDR through the plugin API -- this will allow users to create plugins with more advanced batch processing control, even automatically detecting and grouping HDRs.  I'll make a plugin for this as soon as it's supported. 

This seems like the least effort for the Lightroom team as well -- just add the ability to call the headless mode HDR system with a list of photos to merge, a table with the settings, and a callback that reports the resulting image.

@JarnoP.
You can try using stacks to help group your images together by capture time. 

After you select "Auto stack by capture time"  you can adjust the capture time to fit within your time between shots. I find this helps me when doing HDR panos as well, as other hdr shots. I would really like them to get on the ball with pushing a better automated features for us regarding batch processing. For now stacking and quick keys is all we have. Hope this helps! 

+1 for HDR / Panorama batch processing. Needs to be automatically determine which shots are bracketed even there are more than 3 photos in the bracket. 

Another real estate photographer here wishing for HDR batch processing in Lightroom.

UPDATE: While the process I describe just above does give you quick 32-bit TIFF files, there's considerable color shifting going on. This batch method can't touch the native HDR to DNG in LR. Adobe just needs to implement the batching like Photomatix: Select all shots you want to use as sources. Choose to allow LR to discover how many bracketed shots there were or force it to be within two numbers (for me it's either dual or triple shots), choose the time between each bracket set just like auto-stacking does currently, let me choose how many simultanious HDRs are processed (or auto because LR can see how many cores I have, right?), choose to auto-generate a smart preview for each and then click [GO]. 

LR >needs< HDR and PANO decal stamps on thumbnails for quick ID when mixed among other raw/jpg/etc master files. 

I also need a waaaay more aggressive shadow and highlight slider in Develop. I can take down the windows a bit, but when I paint them out I can drop them several stops back into blue skies. Beef up the shadow and highlight sliders when they detect an HDR image. 

Yes, I just tested this. You can batch raw files into 32-bit unprocessed .hdr radiance files. You then select all of them and open in Preview. In Preview, you select all thumbnails and export to file. Choose TIFF. Import the new 32-bit TIFF into LR and do your perspective corrections and paint out the windows. 

Can photomatix do the batch merge into 32-bit and then you bring those files into LR?

> Adobe please acknowledge this.
Just to set expectations, they rarely pre-announce until a feature is ready to ship.

Adobe please acknowledge this. I would wager that there are thousands upon thousands of photogs that dream of this feature. I have no desire to add 3rd party software, thats why I pay $50 every month to Adobe instead of buying something else in full. I personally do 3 to 4 homes per day and each of those has between 8 and 12 HDR merges. 

Instead of babysitting lightroom for 48 minutes a day just waiting for progress bars to crawl from one side of the screen to the other, let me make better use of my time.