This release is just crazy to me!

The branding is just nuts - renaming an existing product and naming a new product the same name as the existing product did nothing but create massive confusion.  I've now studied this at some length and I'm still not quite sure what is what.  And calling it "Classic" just smacks of "EOL" even if you didn't intend it to.  And if you didn't intend it to, why did you do it?

Reports are the the upgrader is upgrading people without a detailed warning about what they're getting into, and in an irreversible way (or at least a way that's not easy to reverse).  Combine that with the fact that it's now rental software, and that's a major screw up.

Speaking of rental software, I've always been opposed and have never done it.  I've done support contracts but never rental.  So that's bad news for customers and only good news for shareholders.  I'd probably we willing to suck up the fact that Adobe has a gun to my head and just pay it if any of the packages were what I need, but they aren't.  Not only does Adobe have a gun to my head, but they want me to pay for either Photoshop or 1TB of cloud storage despite the fact that those are completely separable and that I don't want either product.

And as for the release itself, the list of new features and improvements literally includes exactly nothing that I actually want.  Here's what I do want:

1. Perpetual license or at the very least a rental option just for Lightroom (no PS, no cloud service).
   
2. Faster interaction when a 4k monitor is in use.  It can literally take 4-12 seconds just to select an image in the grid (on a decent, quad-core machine with the app and catalog on a good SSD) when a 4k monitor is plugged in.  It's 10 times faster when the monitor isn't plugged in.  This is true even when the app isn't on the 4k monitor!
   
3. Control over Photomerge.  I need to be able to manually recenter (and rotate, ideally) and I'd like to be able to assist the merge manually when the automation fails.  It's a nearly-useless feature the way it is.  I almost always (over 90%) round-trip to Hugin because of the lack of centering and rotation.
   
4. Integration of Focus Magic's functionality into the Develop module.  This is literally the only reason I ever round trip to Photoshop (Elements 9 editor) - to make a tiny correction to motion blur or focus using Focus Magic's deconvolution.  Yes, I know it's a slow, processor-intensive operation but round-tripping is way slower and more painful, and you have the technology in-house to avoid it.  This can have a more dramatic impact on image quality than just about anything else when there's even 1 pixel of motion blur in an image (I often shoot very, very fast-moving subjects so it's really hard to avoid all motion blur).

The actual release includes exactly none of that.  Combine that with the rental choice and the lack of a reasonable rental option and there's literally no reason whatsoever for me to even consider LR7 or classic or CC or whatever it's called.  Oh, and the cloud option is a non-starter for me (I have 2TB of images, it would take weeks to upload, I work off-line probably 30% of the time, lack of features, lack of compatibility, etc.).

It seems to me like Adobe is abandoning people who care about Photography (because they are a small and shrinking market of dedicated pros and enthusiasts) to cater to people who don't care about Photography (a large and growing market of people who don't care enough to buy Adobe's products anyway since they think Instagram is the greatest image processor ever).

This is a real bummer guys and gals of the Lightroom team!