Lightroom 5.4 to Lightroom Mobile sync is soooo slow - why no local sync?

Question

I am testing the new Lightroom 5.4 with Lightoom Mobile. What really annoys me is the fact that all photos are going up to the Creative Cloud. I have private pictures which should be private. Always. No upload. No Cloud sync. It is important!
Speed is the next major problem. LR 5 is way too slow for a fluid workflow. But this is mentioned from other users.
What absolutely makes me sad ist the sync speed of LR5.4 to LR Mobile. 100 Photos took up to 4 hours. On a typical wedding I have 2000+ images. Depending on the speed of the first 100 photos I have to wait 80+ hours? Are you kiddding me? This makes LR Mobile unusable. My clients are expecting results fast. Speed is one factor to the next contract.
Overall, I don't want to sync anything into the Cloud. I want a to use my fast local sync via WiFi or USB. Only those two options. I want to sync photos even without any internet connection successfully and quickly.
I'm fine with authentication with Adobe servers for licensing verification. But that's it. The rest should be configurable by the users whether they Cloud sync or not.

Answer 1

Tom, thank you for taking your time to come here and enlighten us with the decision making process behind what was done. Like it was said before here, the Lightroom Mobile so far has been very, very frustrating. I came home very excited to test it and make my dream come true. To be able to take my catalog (or a shoot) with me on the subway, etc and be able to choose the photos on my iPad. See, I am a photographer and I shoot mainly fashion and beauty, so my workflow starts as soon as I finish shooting by importing all images into Lightroom and then going through the painstaking process of choosing which picture to use. I would shoot anywhere between 5-12 looks in a day, around 100 photos per look and at the end of the process I need to choose only one photo from each look. This normally involves going back multiple times to be able to get to only one from each look. The LR Mobile would have been the perfect solution for me, making me able to look at photos while out of the office, on the subway, at home, etc. It would have made my editing process much faster (or less slow). Instead, I've been sitting and waiting for 6 hours so far and only 18 photos showed up on my iPad (from the 500+ that were chosen to be synced from my desktop LR. Now I know it's not my internet that is making it that slow because I have 80+Mbps of download and 40+Mbps upload. And that haven't helped me much as my LR is stuck on "Syncing 527 photos" for the last 5 hours. Most professional photographers that I know deal with a huge amount of photos from a photoshoot. Wedding, fashion, advertising, we all shoot 1000+ images in any given work day. To come home and have to wait 100 hours before we are able to edit on the iPad is just not useful. This will be useful for the amateur photographer that will take photos of their children/dog/flowers and want to be able to show their guests the photos without having to get them in front of the computer.
Now I understand what you said about having to have a centralized place so that all the clients up to date on the changes, and I think that is great but I also think that it's paramount that there's a different way of syncing, a faster, more efficient way. Even if it is, like mentioned, not a "everything in sync" solution. Something like sync the desktop to the iPad and only those two work together. If both are changed before the next sync, a "the 'blabla' catalog has been changed since you last synced, do you want to overwrite it?" takes care of the problem, much in the same way that Photoshop asks us when we are saving something that has been somewhat modified by some external agent between saves. But the beauty of shooting all day, loading everything in Lightroom at night at the hotel and in the morning catch your flight and edit your shoot on the iPad while traveling, or being able to show the clients on the iPad right after you shot the wedding, or (what I was dreaming was going to be possible just to have my dreams crushed when started to use it) shooting tethered on the job and giving the art director the iPad so that he/she can see the shots without having to stay in front of the computer during the whole shoot. Now THAT would be a game changer! That was what I was expecting from LR Mobile but unfortunately got disappointed. I'd pay for the app alone if it did that!