Should I persevere?

Question

I'm a professional photographer shooting RAW who currently uses Adobe Bridge, ACR and Photoshop CS2. I've spent about ten hours with the Lightroom trial, and so far I'm sorry to say that it doesn't look like it would save me any time over my current workflow. Admittedly that's a short period of time, but already I've found that
1) Doing simple searches is pretty straightforward, but anything slightly complicated (by which I mean based on multiple criteria) takes more thought than it ought to and doesn't fill me with confidence that I've found all I was looking for (unlike the simple list of criteria I can build in Bridge's Find dialog).
2) I can't use Stacks at anything other than a folder level. What's the point of them then? I want to be able to import a couple of thousand images from a shoot (or maybe a couple of shoots over a couple of days for the same job for the same client) into one folder, apply keywords, maybe group into collections, then view subgroups of the entire shoot(s) based on this metadata, and then stack related images together to enable me to find the best shots. Surely the major point of Collections and Keywords is that you don't have to think about where your files are physically stored?
I'm not writing this to let off steam (well maybe a little), and there are lots of thing about Lightroom that would be very useful to me that I can't do (easily) with my current workflow (different RAW conversions of the same image for different purposes, e.g. colour and black & white). What I want to know is whether other people have had this initial impression, but have persevered and changed their minds. Time is money: I don't want to spend a week on this thing only to find the best thing would be to upgrade to Bridge CS3 (or buy a Mac and get Aperture!).
Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Simon,
You say,
I'm not writing this to let off steam (well maybe a little), and there are lots of thing about Lightroom that would be very useful to me that I can't do (easily) with my current workflow (different RAW conversions of the same image for different purposes, e.g. colour and black & white). What I want to know is whether other people have had this initial impression, but have persevered and changed their minds. Time is money: I don't want to spend a week on this thing only to find the best thing would be to upgrade to Bridge CS3 (or buy a Mac and get Aperture!).
Yes, it will slow professional workflow for the most part in its present configuration. It is unusable to me as it is, if for no other reason because it will not import files with identical names but differing extensions.
The concept, however, is a good one, and perhaps the LR Engineers can speed it up and flesh it out with the critical, missing, parts in the next version--I won't rehearse them, but a few searches in the 3000+ threads (about 30,000 posts give or take a few) generated here in the last couple of months will bring you up to speed.
I would point out that Bridge CS3(ACR4) and LR use the same engine and have virtually identical 'Develop' features. As for Aperture, others would have to say precisely, but my impression from reading incessently here since day one is that you would likely be no better off--however, there are fewer LR problems on Macs, and LR is apparently faster there--I am on a PC as well.
TiME is money for me as well, so I use Bridge CS3 plus a full featured, fast, DAM that has watch folders and does all my DB ingestion as I work. The present bottleneck in LR is its total (virtually) dependence on Library. But, as I said, if the Engineers can bring it up to comparable speed with comparable features to what I am now using, then I certainly would adopt it.