That's purely a subjective view. The evidence is there are some very talented professional photographers who produce quite exquisite work that have never, ever used an Adobe product to do so. ...
There are some very talented professional photographers who produce exquisite work that never enters the digital domain.
I don't see how that is relevant? The point is that LR is a quite efficient means of producing good results. Many professionals and dedicated enthusiasts can and choose to make something useful out of LR. Even someone like myself who do not spend many hours a day honing my photo skills (I have a dayjob) can make something useful out of LR.
Being able to cover that span is quite impressive. Which is not to say that the product is "perfect", or that certain features does not annoy a large proportion of their users.
I am sort of happy that it is not my job to design a LR competitor. At the same time I cannot help but wish that someone did. Someone with a strong vision and a keen photography interest/background. Someone that listened to all of my advice ;-)
If not, I would hope that at least Adobe would allocate sufficient resources (of the right kind) so as to continually improve their product. I don't mean adding "tick-in-a-box" features, but cleverly redesigning the fundamental workflow and efficiency as they learn new things about their users. Not because their designers thinks that it is cool to do something new, but because they have a genuine belief that it will make their users more productive and satisfied.
To me, consistency is essential. Any complex product (be it software or hardware) can benefit a lot from the collective assumptions that its (target) user base has. They could be Windows users where "ctrl+c" means "copy". Or they could be used to reading from left to right. Or they could come from the "Library" module to the "Print" module assuming that interaction with common elements is consistent. Really small things that (once you do it right) allows people to avoid thinking consciously about _how_ they interact, and rather spend their precious brain resources thinking about _what_ they want to do.
For many of us, the parametric image editor approach was a big change. One that caused confusion and (possibly) frustration. For a large percentage of us, this seems to have paid of in the long run: parametric editing does have some significant advantages.
-h