Noise Reduction is a PITA! Will this ever get easier?

Question

One of the things (and there are many) that I like about LR is the
non-desctrcutive nature of the changes it makes. Recently I had a couple a
hundred shots where I had to use ISO 1600-3200. The LR noise reduction can
not hold a candle to the 3rd party tools. I use Noise Ninja myself. In order
to make sure that I had the best image to work from I had to export from LR
as a PSD in 16 bit and then run NN on the PSD file. The resultant PSD file
is 4 times larger than the DNG in LR. I now also have to deal with 2 files.
I remember reading about an SDK for LR that should allow NN and others to do
this in the same way that LR does its edits in a non destructive fashion.
Is there any progress on this front?
Does DxO 5 offer this?
The current way is really akward.

Answer 1

L. Little,
I haven't lost all hope that Adobe will get more into this. Raw Shooter Pro did not have near the issues with NR that LR has, had some nice pre-processing aspects for Noise (you can set up similar things under LR), and did not seem to create the issues frequently seen in LR especially with High ISO. Hopefully Adobe can pull more of that into the product. I think, from some of the readings on forums, that the whole NR engine in LR was a new redesign, maybe this is a case of "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" at play, with that comes a desire to make whatever the new design is work.. so I guess we'll have to see if the refinements keep coming. I don't think they can ignore all the complaints from people.
The possibility of 3rd party tools linked in from the folks at Noise Ninja, Neat Image, etc. is also something to look forward to. For high ISO images, I tend to let NR tools in CS3 handle the exported JPG after I've done any other adjustments, as opposed to sending it out via conversion, and bringing it back into LR.
Jay S.