Is Lightroom really a professional tool?

Question

I try for a second time to convince a professional photographer, which uses the DAm features of Lightroom heavily, to upgrade from Lightroom 2.7 to Lightroom 3.
A year ago it was the editing of hierarchical keyword, which prevented her upgrading, because this feature did not work.
Now, it is the issue that in keywprd hierarchies some features known from Lightroom 2 are not present or do not work:
1) In LR 3.5 the count of keyword is not applied hierarchical anymore. In LR 3, if I had a hierarchy like this.
Animals
  Dogs
  Cats
the following was calcualated:
Animals 12
  dogs 4
  cats 8
In,Lightroom 3 the total amounts of animals (12) is not calculated:
Animals
   dogs 4
   cats 8
Additionally, clicking on the arrow to the right of animals, in LR2 the images were filtered to all images having keywords which includes all animals and its childs.
Is is a bug, or was this new behaviour applied on purpose?
Now, the workflow of her does not work anymore, probably causing her not to upgrade.
Additionallly, and this should be a bug, if clickling on the arrow at the right of Animals, the images aren't filtered accordingly.
I have no sympathy, that such serious bug in the DAM sections slip through and are still prevalent in the product, or if the new behaviour is intentional, that this is implemented without the option that old behaviour can be recovered.
All in all, I think these are real bugs, which haven't been addressed. This all shows that Lightroom is hardly a professional tool.
May I remember that the keyword editing features aren't resolved completely, still? Keyword completion for keywords with spaces still does not work with parent keywords. And this after how many months / years after the first final release?
This all is absolutely disappointing.
Regards
Thomas

Answer 1

AlanUniqueName wrote:
I never used LR 2 and if the tag count behaviour has changed then I sympathise.   
In your example I think it is because the photos have not been tagged with “Animals” and only the child tags of dogs and cats have been applied.   The counting as it currently implemented works nicely for me – why … because it means I can adopt a lazy “do later” hierarchical decomposition tagging of my shots.    
For example if I have some photographs of mushrooms I will tag them as mushroom but not actually assign a child tag for the type of mushroom until I have got the book out properly identified it.    Although I have hundreds of mushroom shots tagged with child tags of mushroom, I am quite happy to have a count of say 2 against the “mushroom” tag as this is telling me at some point I need to properly identify the mushroom,  assign a child tag of mushroom and remove the “mushroom” tag.
For me when I click on the right arrow next to a parent keyword then I do see all parent and child tagged photos as well – I do not know why you are not getting the same as me.  
As an aside, to support the way I do things I wish I could have an optional setting called “Should not use” for parent keywords and allow filtering or smart collection showing photos which use any such tags.   This would allow me to see at a glance all photos which require some additional child tagging i.e. anything simply tagged “Mushroom”, “Owl”, “Flower”  or “Animal” is not good enough.
In Lightroom 2, the count for parent keywords was calculated as the sum of the counts of assignments of the parent keyword plus the counts of assigments of all child keywords (drilled down to the last tree leaf).
Now the count method is as you describe.
There are certainly reasons to prefer the current method, but it is unprofesional to drop the one method and replace it with another, because you don't know if people depend on the former. This is well known good practice.