I’m not trying to be snarky, but I really don’t understand the resistance to paying a fair price for software that makes my life easier. I have all of my photos in LR CC Classic, and can sync them as needed to my iPad and iPhone. I can also go the other way; if I’m traveling and want to edit on my iPad in LR, the photos and edits will sync back to my Mac. It’s about $120/year. It’s easy. It works pretty reliably. On the Mac, I can use LR Smart Collections and Collections to automatically sync with my Instagram, Flickr and Smugmug accounts.
I'm not aware that we discussed prices at any point in this exchange. But anyhow, you opened up a can of worms here. I acknowledge that my personal stance is certainly a bit extreme in most people's eyes since I am into Free Software and could go on for any length about the problem of closed systems from a user perspective, but it'd get way too political if I did that, so I won't. But let's still consider the matter a bit more deeply.
Actually, I'd be happy to pay for a service that respects my rights and needs as a user and a human being. But modern software licensing is geared towards the opposite - you as a user are mined for resources, information and content, and that's what I am firmly against.
Convenience - as described in your post - and complacency are the root causes of that problem. The sad thing is that we simply can't escape it anymore if we want to take part in modern life. For example, hard as I work to avoid it (I have turned off evey service I can or know of, respectively), Google tries to trespass on my time and activity every single day, mostly by attempting to coerce me into "sharing" information (i.e. provide them with content - including images, quite regularily - they can't obtain themselves - using my resources, and of course, completely free of charge for them), like e.g. images from places I'm at. This happens more or less the whole time. Ignoring it doesn't make it less of a nuisance as these notifcations clog up my smartphone screen (and the one one the smartwatch, too) ...
Okay, I'll not rant on because hardly anyone is interested in that side of the whole affair - people seem to believe it couldn't be any other way.
However, LR is a prime example for forcing people into an ecosystem by providing what can be seen as a mature, functional service - but considering that I'm providing huge amounts of data without being able to withhold whatever I choose, it's actually quite questionable why I should pay at all. Furthermore, if Adobe could make me feel safe about the fact that they won't share any of the information and content I provide or mine it for information, I might even consider their service - but the truth is, they *do* share, mine and abuse their access to my data - you get nag screens if you don't behave like they want you to, and they make leaving extremely cumbersome simply because *you* are the asset they're trying to exploit. Pay for that? No, thanks.
A DAM is about you working with *your* data, *your* content, the products of *your* creativity. As soon as you share any of that, you *decide* that you want that content online - and as we all know, once it's there, all bets are off. But Adobe wants everything you work with on *their* servers, free of charge, thank you very much. That this is - at the very least - peculiar and smells fishy should be obvious. Reclaiming your property should - at the very least - be simple, straightforward and trouble-free, but it's not. That's what I call a scam, or - at the very least - tantamount to one. That it's largely successful doesn't make it any better in my book.
In order not to stir up more of a fruitless discussion, I'll leave this thread alone from now on; moderators, feel free to remove to post should I have offended anyone or broken any forum rules.
M.