As a user since the beginning, I can no longer consider PS/Bridge an acceptable Photography workflow
I am an CS engineer, graphic artist and photographer. I have over 150k edited images and have taken ~a million photographs. I have used PS since the beginning. Modern PS and Bridge are terrible. I have been using computers since the 70s and my opinion is Adobe took the number 1 software product that existed, and has destroyed it and turned it into something people that made the company loathe to use.
I used to use the entire suite, but transitioned off of that a long time ago and never looked back. I only still have PS because of some of my work requires it. I no longer use it for my personal work.
Bridge was an amazing product, and then the worst product launch in my entire life: The completely re-done new Bridge that only let you open 1 folder. ONE! What a f'n joke! It's still not fixed, it's a half baked terrible solution. All the problems I compained about when it first launched on this very forum, are not only very well liked, they still exist. And the performance is nothing less than abysmal. The search won't even search image filenames, only folders!! WTH? I have to search outside of Bridge to find something. LAME. It's beyond lame, it is a terrible product.
Photoshop on Windows still crashes a great deal. They had the auto-recover working- at least for a bit, but is surely doesn't anymore. Never, nada. Nothing. Glad I mostly use it on the Mac.
I am looking at the Welcome/Home screen, despite having that option turned off. I turn off rich tool tips and they still show up. The stupid help tips are the worst software addition I have ever seen. The millenials have ruined this product. If you are young, you don't know. But if you used a stand-alone vesion of PS 15 years ago vs what it is now, you would be thinking the same thing as me... what were Adobe thinking?
I don't think there is any converting me back to an Abobe entusiast. I use it because I have to, not because I want to anymore. And I have met some great Adobe engineers at WWDC back in the day. All that great engineering talent and company leadership is obviously gone.
The real tell is that Adobe isn't listening to it's core customers like me, and it's only getting worse. Yet when I login I get, "YOU'VE BADGED UP" for my forum posts - none of which are complimentary. Says alot. Wish there were a better way to get them feedback, but hopefully some of you out there feeling the same way will know there are others.
Why today? Bridge crashed creating thumbnails and corrupted an entire folder of images... and the thing is, I just go.. this is normal.