Coming back to the original question, I'd say the answer is "no".
I've experimented with a mix of applications: on the DAM side, PhaseOne Media Pro, which anyway I've been using for a decade and a half, and IDImager Photo Supreme. And on the processing side, Iridient Developer - which again I'm pretty familiar with - and Capture One, which I last used seriously a v3.8 before moving first to Iridient, then Lr 1.0, then Ap 2.0.
I like Photo Supreme a lot. It is the only DAM which seems to have realised that we're not in the late 90s any more. It has support for versions (and quite advanced too), it has a very novel and powerful interface, although it has a steep learning curve. It imports Aperture libraries quite smoothly. But it is a little sluggish compared to MediaPro, and the UI is a bit graceless (nowhere near as ugly as Lr though...). Photo Supreme also attempts, quite successfully, to apply edits from some RAW converters to it's previews. But it lacks the automation of MediaPro (auto updates etc).
On the RAW side, Iridient is just fabulous. However, it does lack any kind of healing / retouching / local adjustment feature, so basically it's a front end to Photoshop. CaptureOne 8 does have a rich feature set, although some of those features are surprisingly weak (no Luminance mode for curves ? In 2015??). But C1's Library tools, basically a clone of a subset of MediaPro, are much, much better than in v7. I've successfully imported a 50'000 photo Aperture library, and C1's attempt at match a subset of Aperture's corrections is pretty successful. The GUI can be heavily customised, and with some work can approximate Aperture. Of course, I'm actually very familiar with MediaPro, so I'm actually happy enough with much of it as it is.
The interaction between MediaPro and CaptureOne is more conceptual than factual, but there are some very useful workflows involving both applications, for example large scale key wording in MediaPro, and initial sort/editing before exporting a Catalog to C1. It's a new way of working, it's poorly documented by PhaseOne, but it is worth exploring, imho. MediaPro can also handle a wider range of file types (e.g PSD!)
So basically I've ended up with a system where my "hub" is MediaPro, both for digital and film scan work, my primary workflow is through CaptureOne, but often cross-checking with Iridient, or using Iridient when I need more flexibility. PhotoSupreme could replace MediaPro, and from a feature point of view is better, but switching between it's metaphors and PhaseOne's is just too much trouble.
It's not Aperture, but then again it's also not a one-stop, lock-in shop where you're at risk of having years of work junked on the whim of some suit in Silicon Valley.
Is my approach better than Lr ? Well for me, yes. Clearly when it gets down to ultimate results, the differences between all these applications are trivial to 99% of the potential audience. But to me, Lr still looks like a cobbled together mess of various unsynchronised experiments that was rushed out, supported by a massive, and massively successful marketing campaign, playing to various "star" photographers egos, in reaction to the shock release of Aperture 1.0. Unfortunately, Adobe never saw any reason to do a proper job of things once they'd grabbed the market. Which makes perfect bean counter sense.
But "inevitable" ? No. Valid? Certainly. Probably even very sensible.