Well, that some people are experiencing problems with LR 1.4 is a fact. Whether Adobe is struggling with its software of late is a question of perception. My experience has been that they are producing spectacularly accomplished tools that work well for me day in and day out. Just this afternoon I taught my wife — a professor of art history at Penn State — how to use Lightroom to manage the thousands of images she needs now that she is using Keynote and digital projection to lecture, instead of slides. She was stunned at how elegant and intuitive it is, and started keywording and creating collections immediately. With the help of Martin Evening's very fine Lightroom book and Michael and Jeff's tutorials, I finally feel as though I'm on top of nearly all the functions of the software, and I am frankly amazed at how thoroughly the Adobe engineering team has addressed what photographers need it to do. It's a non-trivial task to really understand Lightroom; I can hardly imagine what it must be like to imagine and then code it! So, even though it's easy to be sympathetic to those who got burned with the 1.4 update, I'm not sure that a little sympathy isn't in order.
