Longstanding Lightroom capture-date metadata issues

Dear Adobe Lightroom Team,

I am a paying Lightroom subscriber and recently encountered a metadata problem that led me to research Lightroom's handling of EXIF and XMP capture dates.

Several professionally processed JPEGs I received contained incorrect or misleading EXIF date information. Fortunately, the correct original capture date and time — including the time-zone offset — had survived in XMP metadata.

In researching the issue, I found multiple discussions in Adobe's own Community documenting similar Lightroom behavior, including cases where Lightroom knows the correct capture time but fails to preserve or write EXIF DateTimeOriginal correctly in an exported JPEG. I also found instances in which Adobe representatives acknowledged related metadata problems as bugs.

I understand that Lightroom legitimately creates and updates metadata associated with editing, processing and export. My concern is specifically with original capture metadata.

The time at which the shutter was released is historical information. Lightroom should reliably preserve that information in the appropriate standard EXIF fields unless the user explicitly chooses to remove or alter it. Adobe's XMP framework provides ample opportunity to record subsequent processing and modification information without compromising or obscuring the original EXIF capture data.

My questions are therefore simple:

1. Does Adobe acknowledge that Lightroom's failure in some circumstances to preserve EXIF DateTimeOriginal and related original capture metadata is a bug?

2. Given that similar EXIF/XMP problems have been reported in Adobe's own forums for many years, does Adobe intend to fix these issues comprehensively?

For photographers who care about long-term digital preservation, accurate capture metadata is not cosmetic. We should be able to trust Lightroom to preserve it.

For reference, here are several discussions in Adobe's own Community documenting these issues:

• “Exported image shows wrong time” — discussion documenting Lightroom failing to include EXIF DateTimeOriginal in an exported JPEG and identifying that behavior as a bug:
https://community.adobe.com/questions-675/exported-image-shows-wrong-time-975618

• “Save Metadata to File overwrites EXIF tag SubSecTimeOriginal” — Lightroom Classic bug report concerning alteration/loss of original EXIF capture-time metadata:
https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-674/p-save-metadata-to-file-overwrites-exif-tag-subsectimeoriginal-664306/index1.html

• “Data/Time digital not shown correctly in Lr 3.4” — Adobe Community discussion dating back to 2011 documenting inconsistencies in Lightroom's handling and writing of EXIF/XMP date fields:
https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-674/p-data-time-digital-not-shown-correctly-in-lr-3-4-662933/index2.html

I would appreciate a substantive response from the Lightroom team, particularly regarding whether Adobe intends to address these longstanding metadata-handling issues comprehensively.

Thank you,

Seth Socolow
Adobe Lightroom subscriber