I also think Apple have done this as they HAVE learned from the FCP-X launch debacle.
A debacle from which the actual product comes up smelling of roses in the end. Going back to FCP6 from FCP-X feels like a twenty year regression, because it is.
This IS the way Apple does things. When they decide something has reached the end of its usefulness, they cut it loose. I remember the howls of outrage when a Mac first came out without a floppy drive, and again when one came out without DVD drive, or Firewire, and when the iPhone changed its power connector for a physically smaller unit that was no longer the limiting factor on the dimensions of the device itself. (iWatch with old style connector? No way).
It doesn't make for a smooth ride as a professional using their kit day in day out to do work. Sometimes they throw away very good functionality and drastically dumb down (eg recent iWork revamp) leaving them temporarily with a significantly inferior offering.
But it DOES mean that they can cut loose from all the accumulated cruft of legacy developments and decade-old design decisions whose usefulness have been surpassed.
My observation is that after a bit of grumbling and moaning, the new stuff offers enough good points to be worth a try.
And can turn out to do the limited subset of stuff it does much more efficiently than it did before.
And can be very shiny.
Whether Photos develops into anything remotely useful for professional photographers remains to be seen.
My guess is that it'll do like most of the rest of Apple's portfolio- it'll give you 80% of the results for 40% of the effort. Getting the final 20% of polish/functionality will be a pain in the ass. If your workflow or customers genuinely need that missing functionality you'll have to go to a specialist to find it, either different package or plug-ins.
For a lot of people, me included, that tradeoff between ease/speed and ultimate capability works out well, on balance.
FCP-X is demonstrably faster to edit with for mere mortals like myself and my wife. We just edited and graded an hour-long RED 4K movie in two days. That would have been inconceivable with FCP6/7 plus Resolve; the transcode time alone would have taken that long. We were several minutes into the editing the story before the footage even finished importing.
Pages still works absolutely fine for me for what I use it for- writing stuff down legibly so I can print it or send it around to people as a PDF, usually in Apple's default formatting (which is nice enough). If I were I specialist book publisher or author, I'd doubtless feel different.
So I'd say, sadly, Aperture getting canned is entirely in character for Apple.
What they may have learned is that they need to give us a heads-up about these things, not just say "you can't buy the old version as of this morning" which I think was really the cock-up with FCP.
So my bet is they'll bring out Photos to general derision but with enough functionality a year down the line that a lot of generalists, even professional generalists like me, might find it worth checking out.
For everyone else, there's C1 Pro or LR5.
Cheers, Hywel.
