Adobe truly has a record of never having heard the adage, "If it's not broken, don't fix it." Just witness the morass of Acrobat, which I've used for 20-years (as has my wife, the AD/graphic designer). The greatest lament of anyone who uses Acrobat with any regularity is, "The last really usable version of Acrobat was Acrobat 5".
What does this have to do with Lightroom? Simple. Where they COULD have fixed Lightroom (quicker, less buggy, more responsive tools/adjustment brushes), they've ignored for years. Instead, they shoehorn us into CC. Ok, I bit, and now I use CC for all my Adobe apps. Now, they decide to "split" Lightroom, and in doing so, appear to have crippled both. WTF? Here's a nice chart from
Lightroom Classic vs Lightroom CC that nicely summarizes the differences, something I could directly find on Adobe's own website. Additionally, why not obfuscate thing even more by dropping the year description (i.e. - 2015) which they've been pushing for several years to differentiate versions.
I really don't know why companies push so bloody hard to force one "onto the cloud" for their software? The answer is again simple. These companies are located in major urban areas when bandwidth is measured in the hundreds of Mbps, or even Gigabits. For some reason, they assume EVERYONE has this. And that people don't have data caps. (I'm lucky, no data caps at this point compared to an ISP like Comcast or cell phones.) I have crap for connection (8Mbps download, 700Kbps upload), it can be inconsistent, dropping out or slowing down randomly (thank you, CenturyLink), and as a result, don't want to rely on cloud solutions for anything. I've already dropped several companies/software for doing this (Neat, Blinkbid).
So back to Lightroom. You will notice, for some reason, "Searching" is no longer available in the desktop version. I hope that's a misprint, otherwise, which moron software engineer said, "Oh, let's get rid of the search function for the desktop".
So needless to say, I view Lightroom change as not the most positive one; change for the sake of change, not necessarily improvement except for a handful. Finally, I work on dual calibrated, Adobe RGB gamut monitors. Why do I want to edit on my iPad? I'll stay with 2015.12 for a while longer.
Thus endeth my rant.