After a few weeks with Lightroom, I wonder how one can design such a counter-productive UI.
Not everyone thinks that way. I've always found LR, since the first beta, to be a brilliant design concept that's easy and fast to use. Sure there are plenty of ways it can be improved, but the core ideas work very well for me.
Reading through your 'rant' a very large amount is tiny nit picking based on your own ingrained work practices. Saying "The keys do not follow any discernible logical scheme, so they have to be memorized explicitly. " Well sorry, but that's been the way since day one with computers, why is Ctrl-V paste ? or Ctrl-Z undo ? Whereas the most common short cuts I use in Lightroom are G=grid, E=expand, D=develop seem pretty logical to me, but I speak English. If the localisation of Lightroom doesn't work for you, that's another issue.
There are so many functions in modern programs it's inevitable that some short cuts won't be perfectly intuitive, but ultimately that's why we use Graphical UIs, not CLI now.
Why does LR impose a policy on naming the directories? Why can't I have a decent structure with job names in the directory names instead of just an anonymous date?
This doesn't make sense. You can put your files anywhere you want, in any directory you want. Yes, the ability to create a hierarchy of folders from within LR beyond the simple subfolder option might be beneficial, but it doesn't impose any particular name or structure on you.
So Adobe thinks it is good to force everyone to use a library. Wouldn't be so bad if the library where functional complete.
But selections seem to miss simple things like NOT (ever tried to select a monstrous list and then exclude one entry, not really efficient).How can I find all shots of Lions that where made neither in Tanzania nor Namibia?
Just hover over the selection box and you get a tooltip that says "Enter text search here. Add"!" to the front of a word to exclude it"
(See iMatch hierarchical categories for example).
iMatch is about as intuitive and user friendly as plumbing a nuclear reactor. NOT a good example.
And why do we have the module switching on an extra wasteful bar at the top instead of in the top menu bar. Even folded away, it takes up valuable pixels of screen estate for no real gain.
It hardly takes up much room, but provides the visual cue to activate it.
When adjusting sliders, why do I have to click on a slider to enable the mouse wheel? Just hovering should be enough.
Which wouldn't be very helpful behaviour if you want to scroll up and down the panel with the mouse wheel. Click to engage a control makes perfect sense to me.
Why can't regional adjustments be toggled on or off?
Switch bottom left of the panel.
And why do I still need to branch out to an external editor when I want to clone out parts.
Because its not designed to do
everything. Already the range of options is intimidating some users, but still many of us want/expect greater functionality.
How hard is it to have some path name variables for the output definition?
Adding scripting options looks to be very far away in the developers minds and with good reason. Very, very few users want to get involved with scripting in
any application.
The bottom line is Lightroom is different and most people find that distinction to be part of it's appeal.
