It's a fine apology, and I'm willing to believe a sincere one as well. I'm still cynical enough to believe that the quick response was driven mostly by the large negative response to this release. Certainly this communication is significantly different in tone from some of the other releases coming from Adobe.
I'm hopeful that Adobe will take a much closer look at how this release was driven. Mr. Hogarty wrote, "Lightroom was created in 2006 via a 14 month public beta in a dialog with the photography community. In making these changes without a broader dialog I’ve failed the original core values of the product and the team." There apparently was no dialog with the community at large, at least I haven't heard anyone claim they were consulted. On the other hand, if I had been one of those consulted I sure wouldn't admit it now. (grin)
I'm also hopeful that Adobe will consider that listening to their "customers, educators and research team" didn't provide good feedback. Again, I'm cynical enough to believe that "customers" were those that called for technical support, "educators" were a very small subset of the people who write books and train users in LR, and "research team" were folks who used terribly flawed sampling techniques to try to define the future of the product.
Above all I'm hopeful Adobe will truly take this flawed release to heart. They should be very mindful that one of the more popular posts on photoshop.com regarding these issues, particularly the changed import function, congratulated the LR development team on their work and exclaimed that sales were up 15%. The poster signed it using "Capture One" What's sad for Adobe is that this implied threat of converting to a different product is coming closer to reality for many people.