I'm just struggling to see the benefit of LR.
OK, for example, let's imagine I want to find all photos of a scene I've visited a few times, and they're scattered across 3-4 drives. I'm not sure if Bridge even lets me search by keyword across multiple drives, but it's not very quick for it to interrogate thousands of files. A few seconds in Lightroom. Then I want to find another group of pictures, it's back to square one in Bridge, another trivial task in Lightroom. Push your picture archive up to 6 figures, Lightroom's still happy. So that's tasks like finding, sorting, categorising that Lr does so much better. Save time organising, use it on creative tasks.
Then consider physical safe-keeping. Let's complicate things by keeping some of the photos on a drive that's switched off or otherwise unavailable. Not a chance of finding them in Bridge as it doesn't know the drive ever existed but the photos are all recorded in Lightroom's catalogue. So imagine the drive had crashed, or some folders are missing because someone accidentally deleted them. Lightroom tells you something should be there and helps you verify the restoration task. In other words, it has a role in safeguarding your work.
And so one can go on. Virtual copies mean you can do alternative versions of even duplicate entire shoots (eg b&w versions of a wedding shot) with no disc space. Look at Develop and its History panel which records what you did to an image and allows you to undo work even in later sessions. Map allows you to visualise where you took shots, maybe plan return visits. Print doesn't exist in Bridge, nor does the mobile workflow.
So what you're doing is comparing a glorified version of Explorer/Finder that's designed for anyone, with a tool that's designed to be an integrated self-sufficient environment for managing and processing large numbers of photographs.