P: Ability to sync Lightroom Classic keywords with the Lightroom Ecosystem

Yes, it is easier, but Engineers love a challenge. But could be they were stopped by Marketing or Finance.
I am using Photo Mechanics for some years, because PM does not have a catalog. In LR Classic you can create a Smart Collection to find all picture with changed metadata by third party apps and then you can read all these updated meta data. This is useful if you do all your tagging in PM and want to have this info synced to LR mobile. Currently I am using Mylio for that, but my hope was to have all in LR. I am not giving up hope.

"No Engineer is implementing caption sync and not keyword sync."

Don't bet on it, Peter.

If you consider it, caption sync is easier for the engineer - it's just reading/writing a photo's text entry. Each keyword is a separate entity, so syncing would need to loop through the keyword structure looking for matching items (note hierarchy is an issue) and then apply those keywords to the photo. So more difficult, but not rocket science - if the will is there.

PhotoMechanic, like Bridge, just uses xmp to store tags and other metadata, and LR simply reads that.

@Peter Chater, how do you get your tags from Photo Mechanics into the LR catalog?

Have tested the sync of caption/subtitle and it working fine. You can change it in Web, LR Mobile or LR Classic and sync is done in each direction.
This gives me hope that Adobe is fixing the Keyword Sync. No Engineer is implementing caption sync and not keyword sync. Anyway, caption sync is working for me because I am doing all my keyword tagging with Photo Mechanics and fill caption field automatically with name of picture folder and keywords.

I also think this syncing issue is a big let down. I was hoping to give keywords also in Lightroom cc and Lightroom web and they sync to LR classic

John and Johan, looks like you have insider information. Ok, then the whole keyword sync is useless. Shame on Adobe Software Engineering 🙂
I am an Engineer by myself and know how difficult such a sync mechanismn is. Let us hope the best that they change their minds and implement it later.

Correct. So if you upload from a raw file the keywords will not sync. If you upload from a TIFF or JPEG and you've written the metadata to the file itself, they will sync, but only once. If you make any changes, those changes will not sync.

That's not right Peter.  I would phrase it like this - and advise you to read carefully "Keywords sync from LR Classic to LR Mobile if the keywords have been saved directly into the image itself (not xmp sidecar) when the image is first uploaded, but not from LR Mobile to LR Classic"

This is not a bug. It is Adobe's deliberate design decision.

Keywords sync from LR Classic to LR Mobile, but not from LR Mobile to LR Classic. Star ratings sync in both direction. Changes in picture sync in both directions. For me this missing keyword sync is a bug. And Adobe will fix it.

OK, I correct: two one picture two different sets of keywords are associated. Imagine that for other parameters ... this makes no sense for the user.