In my opinion, Adobe have given up the amateur enthusiast photographer customer segment. The amount of marketing doublespeak required to "justify" Adobe's decisions points to its major flaws: Adobe promised (https://blogs.adobe.com/.../lightroom-and-the-creative-cloud....) to keep offering a perpetual license in future versions, thereby influencing buyer decision for Lightroom 6. Then they made it very hard to actually buy the perpetual license version of LR 6, and now they argue that buyers were deliberately choosing the CC version. I believe a significant number of LR users are in the same segment as me: Amateur enthusiast photographers who need a photo management and RAW developer tool, but do not use it on more than one or two devices. For those users, the choice of the perpetual license made the most sense. I am unwilling to pay a monthly amount which will add up the normal upgrade price in under a year, unless it provides me with significant advantages. So, about those advantages... Adobe argued that the 2015 CC version would regularly get new features, which would have been an incentive to choose it over the standalone LR 6 version. Looking at the list of features that have been added to LR 2015 CC, I must say that it's neither long nor that impressive. It certainly does not point to continuous development of the CC version. It would certainly haven't justified the higher cost for LR 2015 CC for me. Nevertheless, Adobe might argue that the new Classic CC version is the right choice for me, as it offers new features and performance improvements. Let's see... The Classic CC version offers some badly needed performance improvements - finally, one might say. However, those are limited to a few specific functions. If Adobe were really serious about LR's performance, they should have really worked on that in LR 5 and 6. Adobe also promise that they will continue to support and develop LR Classic CC. Just as they promised to offer a perpetual version? Honestly: As the development effort seems to have gone mostly towards the new cloud version, visible in the fact that the new LR Classic CC does not really offer that many new or improved features, how likely is it that LR Classic CC is a good choice for the next few years? Well, Adobe might say, if you want the latest and greatest, get the new CC version! Apart from the very unfortunate and confusing choice of product name, the cloud version is not even feature-complete when compared to the classic version, as I understand it. It offers cloud support, though - but I really don't need that as an amateur. Even some professionals seem to balk at the cloud-centric design. So why would I choose a less powerful, but more expensive version? To summarize: Adobe's past behaviour indicates that they can neither be trusted to support the classic CC version long enough nor that choosing the new, much more expensive cloud version will offer true benefits for amateur enthusiast photographers. The most rational choice for me seems to keep using LR 6 with the perpetual license for as long as it is viable, while researching other options for my next toolset.
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