In reply to Fraser:
I read the review and also have tried out Lightroom 6. I have mixed opinions about it.
I think building pano. stitching and HDR into Lightroom was a good move and the fact that it stitches RAW files into DNG format is brilliant and unique. Yes, both features are missing options and could have been done better - a lot better - but they work for the majority of cases.
Speed is a HUGE problem. I find LR6 to be incredibly slow, even compared to LR5 which was already slow. This makes some improvements useless - for example, it doesn't matter whether the software supports modification of a graduated filter if the brush tool is too slow to use! (I've been using brush tools since Paint, and in Photoshop since Photoshop 5 on a 166 MHz Pentium. I have never experienced one that is quite as slow as Lightroom's.)
Everyone keeps repeating Adobe's statement that LR6 is "faster" but, in my experience, it isn't. Some features, like the Grid, are the same. Others are obviously slower.
LR6 is also very buggy. The Crop tool in the Develop module often breaks, for me, replacing the image of the picture with a blue rectangle with white lines. Restarting Lightroom fixes this but it is a pain. Several other features feel very flaky and unpolished - like flagging and unflagging which sometimes just doesn't do anything.
Finally, there's the promise that LR6 can use your graphics card. Perhaps it can, but it doesn't seem to work with mine. I have a nVidia GTX 780m, a very good card, and yet Lightroom is SLOWER with it enabled than without.
This release has left me conflicted because all of these new things sound like good ideas and I WANT to like Lightroom. I just wish they had done a slightly more professional job.
The bottom line is this, though: there isn't really an alternative. If you want to work with large databases of photographs in RAW format, you just have to swallow the shit Adobe kick out and buy Lightroom.