P: I would like to synchronize over LAN/Cable instead of internet

Thank God, no, and I hope I never do!

You apparently never work in an area with limited or no internet connection.  All Adobe has to do is provide a REAL "Export as Original" with all the included XMP data and with IpadOS you can transfer the edits in the field to a PC.  Not a great solution but workable in situations where internet is unusable.

I am not a coder, but after a 25 year IT career I've learned that: syncing the same dataset both locally to another computer AND over the internet AT THE SAME TIME is unbelievably difficult to achieve and rife with danger to your data. Adobe wisely stays away from taking a chance on losing all your images. It has to be one or the other, and I, for one, am SO glad it's the Cloud, it makes my life SO much easier. End of line.

No problem - I really didn't make it clear in my original post that I didn't feel that way. Thanks for being considerate, regardless.

I can see how my post might have felt like it was pointed at you. Sorry 'bout that. Obviously no point in complaining at you, and I can see that you are just trying to help.

I don't consider it an "edge case", but the fact that Adobe hasn't done anything to solve it in the years we've been harping on them leads me to believe that they think it is, as far as their overall goals are concerned.

"Edge case"? It's hard for me to believe that needing to work on a mobile platform and then efficiently importing into LR from the mobile device is an "edge case". For (I dare say) many of us, there is simply no need to force the Cloud into that workflow, and it is anything but efficient. Also hard for me to believe that Adobe is preparing to sacrifice its subscription-based revenue stream and chase us to another platform. I sure hope they wake up before this happens.

In my case, all that is needed is for LR mobile to support airdrop since my desktop is an Apple iMacPro. In addition to limited to no internet on travel, I live in the country and the internet charges (not to mention the subpar bandwidth) make the current use of the cloud completely unreasonable. If Adobe would support a LAN transfer, then we could work in a mobile environment and then import the RAWs into LR Classic as we do now. There would be no need to finesse the interface between LR mobile & Classic.

I like the idea, and most iPads are certainly powerful enough to generate the required Smart Previews, but I think we're still looking at something that is at odds with how Adobe sees Lightroom in the long run. As phones gradually kill off professional photographers, Adobe wants to expand Lightroom beyond the pro (Lightroom Classic) market and compete with Google/Apple Photos (I don't see any reason why this would succeed, honestly), and those services all want to be where your master photos live.

The mobile product only kinda works with Classic if you do everything correctly and in the right order - witness how it handles metadata, etc - but only because it has to, or pros would find another tool. So, the mobile product is part of Lightroom (formerly CC) that plays as nice as it can with Classic, and New Lightroom has no use for Smart Previews beyond working with Classic. So, Adobe would either have to drop its insistence on syncing only via their cloud service, or decide that Smart Previews can be part of the non-Classic product to support this particular edge case. I don't see them doing either at this point.

Another idea, how about having LR mobile do the same as classic optional, uploading the much smaller smart previews, when in an area with a bad connection. And sycn the full size when a good connection is available.

This way I could show and edit the photos already and have a much faster upload than pushing gigabytes of original raws into the cloud at once.

There could be a switch "upload only smart previews" directly in the  upper right cloud menu, or a "prioritize smart-preview upload" and only push the originals after that. It should also give some feedback like "uploading 222 smart previews, 423 fullsize photos pending".

But then the mobile device would have to render all that smartpreviews, that would take some processing power.