Lightroom or Bridge for large libraries?

I have some two hundred thousand images in thousands of files. Bridge allows me to immediately access the entire lot, and to do metadata searches- although I have had problems with Bridge crashing if I try to search among too many files. Lightroom is advertised as the central sorting place for libraries, but with the time and effort it would take to import them all, it seems obvious that Bridge should be used to access my library, and Lightroom used just for processing new imagery. Any thoughts?

I too have about that many images to manage, and some days hundreds to cull, develop, title, keyword, and sort to a long established, well organized, stable, effective hierarchical folder structure. At the present time, I can do that work about twice as fast using Bridge CS3 beta 2 --with one caveat--I infrequently will have to restart Bridge if I am saving out a large number of final files to another format, because of Bridge beta 2s present memory leak'. Which no doubt will be fixed by the time it ships in about a week from now. Even so, it is still much faster for MY workflow (based on timed tests).
Bridge is more configurable overall, has a better ( more configurable and less crowded )UI and ACR 4 UI, is faster with file I/O, previews, etc, simply because it is not dependent on a DB. I already have a mature DAM that is fast and full featured.
Will LR be brought up to speed with respect to features, configurability, code speed, etc, to where it is competitive with Bridge CS3 plus a mature DAM? We'll (should) soon see. And I hope so--I like the concept! But until that is the case, there is no way that I would even consider moving my 200k images to its DB. Library is simply a workflow bottleneck at this time.
By the way, I am curious as to why you say that LR should be used for processing new files? What is the advantage of LR Develop--at least in its present version over ACR 4--they both use the same code, and the UI of ACR 4 is far less crowded, organized better ( horizontal tabs requiring less mouse movement than one long vertical slider), faster previews,etc, allowing faster workflow?

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  • Does Lightroom make Bridge obsolete?

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    T.N. Turner, www.TheArtfulToad.com
    Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 16:19:10 -0700
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Subject: Does Lightroom make Bridge obsolete?
        Re: Does Lightroom make Bridge obsolete?
        created by web-weaver in Photoshop Lightroom - View the full discussion
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  • Lightroom and Bridge

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