As a photographer who has stitched for years, and used most of the software, I am very pleased with the LR pano tool. I will pan both vertical and horizontal and many times with a wider lens. I used to worry about being nodal, but with landscapes I find that its just not that important. Where as with a building or anything with "known" dimensions being nodal can be important.
At first I did not really give the LR stitching tool much attention, as I assumed it was the same as the tools in CC photoshop, which have not changed much since around CS5. At least the results seem the same. Instead LR seems to have some improvements in their algorithm as LR seems to be able to get stitching solutions that CC 2014 can't resolve. LR carries forward the excellent blending ability of CC but it really does a great job on what I call difficult stitching solutions. These are either shot with ultra wide in horizontal or images with a lot of intricate pattern like a suspension bridge. I have not tried CC 2015 to see if their pano tool has also improved.
Of course the fact that you can stitch and create a dng, then continue to work on the image as a raw file is invaluable, something that none of the other software tools can do.
I have no idea how well LR will handle multi row vertical stitches, and that still may be the domain for ptgui, but for single row, (so far up to 7 images vertical and 5 horizontal) LR does an excellent job indeed.
Paul
