Re-reading that it's interesting to quote from the last section;
"Capture One does outshine Lightroom in some respects though. The color editing sliders offer better fine-tuning control, particularly for skin tones. The Shadows and Highlights sliders have a greater range of tone control when editing regular dynamic range images. The new Luma Curve is useful for precise control of luminance and color contrast"
Which is what I said and you tried to disprove with your reference, own goal there Mark ;-)
I did say I wouldn't respond on this thread any longer, but on this one post it is appropriate that I do so regardless. I'm glad you have now really read that article and found that Martin is, after all, balanced and objective in reporting his findings.
When I pointed you toward that article, it was in response to your statement in reply 36: "
Colour is the one area that CO walks all over LR. Both in overall and local areas." This is a rather sweeping generalization, and it brought back to mind that article of Martin's, in which he reported the findings of his research indicating that such generalizations are at the least very much open to question. That's all I was trying to establish. I have no problem with the fact that each application has its comparative strengths and weaknesses, because it conforms with my experience over the years.
I may just add as a general point about raw converters: there always have been a number of contenders at the forefront. The population changes over time, but some years ago I sat on a panel at Photo Expo in NYC - it was Andrew Rodney's "Iron Chef" panel setting the key contenders of the time to use their wares for working up a challenging photo supplied by a famous photographer. Both LR/ACR and CO were in contention, as was Apple's Aperture and one other, I forget the name. The most interesting outcome of this competition was how very closely all of them performed in the hands of the people who really knew how to use them, regardless that they had different algorithms and different interfacing for their tool sets. From that moment on I became yet more wary of broad generalizations about raw converters and remain so, especially after reading Martin's article which only reconfirmed my perspective. Everyone has their preferences of course - but I think a choice between them ultimately depends on three things: workflow preferences, particular features most important to the user, and finally price. Which latter I remind is what this thread was supposed to be about!