More retouch abilities in LR

I guess your question is a natural progression of what commercial photographers have done from days of analog. Back then they were doing sky replacements and changing the form of models in the darkroom. Digital made that easier. AI is making it even easier.

However, you seem more interested in creating digital art from a photographer rather than maintaining the integrity of objects which make a photograph. Just my opinion.

"...would make the program much better without adding too much bloat." I don't know how you determined this but I see this as a huge bloat to the point of potentially round triping the image to an Adobe backend server.  The AI for some of this, like double chin removal, I see as very heavy lifting.

I think some of things you are looking to do can be done in Adobe Photoshop today just not as a single click if you are so inclinded to learn more about it's editting.

It sounds like you may want to review your workflow and incorparate other tools such as Retouch4Me.

There’s nothing wrong with requesting it (although formal feature requests should be submitted over in the Ideas section of this community, where Adobe can attach a development status if they start working on it), but one thing should be kept in mind when comparing this to Photoshop.

Photoshop is a traditional pixel editor, and Lightroom Classic / Lightroom / Camera Raw are raw processors first. The fact that they are raw processors means every adjustment takes more computing power than in Photoshop, because to keep the edits nondestructive, they have to be optimized in a way that they don’t take too long to re-process through the raw-to-preview pipeline every time you change a setting. Photoshop is like other traditional photo editors in that it’s editing an image that’s already demosaiced to channels with pixels (such as RGB), and the retouch features produce rendered pixels, so the computing load in Photoshop is a lot lighter.

This helps explain why some features such as the healing/cloning tools work much faster and look better in Photoshop, why adding more of those edits to a image doesn’t slow down as much in Photoshop, and why the fancier features like Face-Aware Liquify, the portrait-oriented Neural Filters, and such are still only in Photoshop and not yet in any of the Adobe raw editors.

So maybe adding portrait features to Lightroom is a good idea, but compared to Photoshop and other portrait software, the same features may take a lot more work to implement in the Adobe raw processors. And, Adobe has to decide that new portrait features are more important than the other new features they are developing. Which could happen if this feature request is submitted and gets a lot of votes and discussion in the Ideas section. You can get a sense of what other priorities are in play, and what portrait features are competing with, by looking at the feature request vote rank in the Ideas section.

My first reply, was of course indicating existing Software to do such things. And yes, I would dearly like a vote down button. But an afterthought...

Does anything like what the author is suggesting exist in Photoshop? If so, then Adobe already has some tech experience in such that could perhaps migrate over as many features first showing up in PS eventually show up in LrC.

Anthropics PortraitPro

"would make the program much better without adding too much bloat." 

It would be 100% bloat for all the landscape, bird, wildlife, motoe sports, aviation, macroc - etc. - LightRoom users.

"For landscape photography, there are already functions such as "Dynamics" and "Remove haze".

They're of use to way more than just landscape shooters. I'm a bird/wildlife guy, and I use Dehaze on just about every image - and it's great on the rugby, motor sport and aviation pictures I take, too.

Point is - I get the appeal to you of what you're asking for,  but it's really niche, and moves Lr in a direction it's patently not planned to move in.

(I've written this because there's - stupidly - no "downvote" button: why Adobe/the forum administrators are of the ridiculous impression that people only ever want to upvote or ignore an idea - the only two options available - utterly baffles me. It's ridiculous on its face.)