P: Allow Catalog to be stored on a networked drive.

Not in the slightest

as an addendum, and rereading all of your posts... How many hours have you spent making your workflow "work"?
Apply your hourly rate as a photographer, and add up the money this has cost you.
Then add the additional gear, and potentially donation payments for any scripts you didn't write yourself, the hours of fixing those when lightroom updates, payments for a drop box/cloud account, gadgets and gear just for this purpose and you eventually have beat lightroom into a useful workflow for you that you could simply have had "out of the box" perhaps for a $100 or so more if Adobe had made it "right".

So no, throwing $400 in ram at an imac is like trying to stuff a porsche engine into a lada. Sure it's going to run faster, but it's still a lada.

Throwing ssd's and what have you at lightroom is still building on a flawed foundation. The fact that you have done so, and still argue that lightroom "works just fine" is absolutely bizarre.

You buy a base iMac, to make it better you spend $400 on RAM. It;s a similar scenario right?

aside from being single user, there isn't much performance hit on the database - if it's kept lean. The metadata is the only real impact on the lcat file - I'm pertaining to its performance when importing and exporting the "whole shebang" so I can use it say on my laptop.

I just choose a 3088 photo lcat and Exported to a Catalogue at starting at 5:51pm

So in a work environment, I am effectively at a standstill until this is complete. It's occurring from one sata drive to another.

Transferring this over the wifi onto my laptop is rediculous, as is copying via usb or firewire or whatever.

I should simply be able to have my pics in one location and my lcat accessible from where ever I need it to be.

I'm now sitting waiting for it to finish.
......................... 5:59 @ 87%................
........ 6:01 @ 100% complete ..... and a 14 gig folder of stuff I have to cope with

Anyone who thinks this is practical has far too much free time on their hands, which is great for them, but crappy for me.

"Additionally because lightroom is so underpowered, regardless of what database structure it is built on, it's simply impractical to have one massive lcat for anything - especially due to the band-aid approach of importing and exporting. "

I have two catalogs - one at work (90,000 images) and one at home (150,000 images). There's very little difference in performance between those and test catalogs with 1,000 images or less.

So... you are spending $400 per SSD as a work-around to get a $90 piece of software to work how it "should", out of the box.

Here is the MAJOR rub, for me. LR should function over a network. Most other devices do. Because it doesn't, it leaves a MAJOR hole for someone to exploit. Had Microsoft not killed off Expression Media, or known what to do with it, LR may have been just a footnote in photography history.

I agree a local cache is the way to go. I doubt it would be THAT difficult to implement that as part of a PROPERLY network shared backend.

I'd like to point out, Dropbox IS encrypted. Both ON the server, and on the transfer, and if you want to use it, also has 2-factor authentication which is far more secure than a plain password.

I split my LR catalogs up into 'camera shot', i then have hard drive publish services for clients and other client based delivery types. I import to multiple drives at teh same time so I fairly do the same thing twice.

Some services publish over a network where I pick up a catalog from the published folders. There's some scripting in the middle to make new directories for back up purposes. I also have an archive which sends content onto tape after a given time, that then publishes through to keep current work, current. My catalogs don't then get huge.

with SSD's in my machines, swapping catalogs is a blink of an eye

No, i'm not a big corp picture house, but even so It's about using the tools to the best of their ability, adding better tools to pick up the slack, then with a bit of massaging and scripting to tie it all up.

But my point was, keeping a catalog local or a cache of, then sending that to a server is better than working directly off a server.

I believe you have wholeheartedly missed my point

wow
if you think exporting your "whatever" is an applicable workflow than there is nothing more I need to say.

Earlier, I mentioned that I have lcats for different aspects of work/play, etc. I had photos on my sd card that needed to be in two locations yesterday, so I imported into one catalogue, tagged, and then exported what I needed in the "other" lcat.

That process took 2 minutes to export, import and go back to the original lcat and delete. Each time having to "relaunch" lightroom into the other catalogue, foolishness.

And that was for 100 photos.
Those "two minutes" can occur upwards of ten times a day.

So I wholeheartedly disagree that to do this in a work environment with others having to do the same thing is a colossal waste of our time. And the drop box solution is also a bandaid without privacy, and if another person sharing the folder deletes something by mistake you all loose the file.

Additionally because lightroom is so underpowered, regardless of what database structure it is built on, it's simply impractical to have one massive lcat for anything - especially due to the band-aid approach of importing and exporting.

As for your "caveats of issues as long as my arm" in dealing with networking, again, you should examine the devices you can buy off the shelf at any staples, future shop or best buy - or swing a cat and pick another retail outlet - and you'll find though they all have different packaging, they all work on the same network platform - tcpip, smb, etc. Reinventing the wheel and going against the grain is exactly the issue here.

They built on a system that does not allow sharing, that was a bad design choice, and people are complaining because Lightroom was touted to be this, and instead it's that - but still sold as "this".

Lastly, if by so many other database platforms out there you mean less than ten - and half of which are SQL or based on SQL and the other half are platform specific, outdated or discontinued, then sure, there's a veritable plethora of alternative solutions out there.

Personally, I love Filemaker which is not based on SQL - but does play nice with some aspects of it through ODBC etcetera - but that is NOT mainstream and implementation would be difficult to make Lightroom run on that for all platforms, and it's whole internal structure would need to change rather than just a couple of syntax alterations - so no, proper SQL is the easiest "best fit" approach.

Did I say years, I can't remember, it was late. Anyway..It'll take more than a week for sure, and it would still be SQL based. Pointless in my opinion. There are so many better DB's out there for this kind of MAM work.

MySQL is well known for being a bit temperamental with wide search criteria, Fact. Anyway, we digress.

"There is no reason why the catalogue can't be shared on any "mainstream" network. "

Correct, i'm merely saying that with that comes caveats as long as your arm. Support becomes a nightmare and the program becomes something that needs specific knowledge to actually make work.

All LR needs to become more collaborative is a better workflow for exporting catalogs and relinking media. The rest is fine. You'd do better to address the main stream of thought as opposed jumping on a specific sentence