one of the things I tried to suggest regarding Bridge was that the default layout was a major part of why Bridge had a low uptake.
I am convinced of it: the Default Layout in Bridge is abysmal and many people never dig deeper.
I have heard that a new team is working on Bridge so perhaps we will see good things evolve before too long.
But, for me, the ACR 9.2 panel runs rings around the Lr tools: spacious, clean, clear, fast and incredibly efficient. Multiple-selecting a swathe of images in Bridge and hitting Cmd R to open the whole lot in Slide-mode, I can access and work on several hundred images simultaneously. With the KBSCs and Synchronising, I can process over 1000 RAW images a day in ACR.
I open the entire shoot in Bridge-hosted ACR and do a preliminary previewing of each frame in the ACR Panel (zooming as needed) and rate and discard files from there. A second run of the high-star files through ACR then provides more-refined and polished edits for archiving.
I find that I can only do one tenth of that number in Lr because of its excruciatingly slow Previewing and Processing and the cramped way in which the Develop Module has been designed. This cramping is exacerbated when I am working on my small MBPr.
To me, the only way to make Lr bearable, is to Rate and pre-process all of my RAW files in ACR
before I import them into Lr!