QUOTING: bythom.com The Software Saga Continues

"Photo Mechanic (PM) has decided to go subscription-based, too. And here’s where a problem with subscriptions comes into play. Camerabits, the maker of PM says they need the ongoing stream of revenue to continue development. Okay, I looked at my account with them. Over the course of 14 years I’ve spent almost US$600 on Photo Mechanic (e.g. US$43/year for upgrades, seats). From a user standpoint, did I get more useful features, better performance? Not really. The UI is still the same geeky kludge it’s always been, the feature set has had minimal change. The thing I’ve apparently been paying for is small bug fixes and keeping up with the camera companies’ raw formats. Also, transitioning to Apple Silicon and keeping up with computer OS changes. These are what I call “foundation” issues

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So PM’s problem is simple: a decent Ingest standalone product coupled with Lightroom (not Classic) makes for a complete basic package for someone. At least someone who can keep their files organized. Meanwhile, Lightroom Classic is the whole enchilada: it ingests, browses, processes, and outputs. The primary reasons many of the pros use PM is speed and IPTC labeling, but the speed benefit has slowly been eroding over other possibilities (e.g. FastRawViewer). "

^^^^— Speed is a feature, ensh*tification is a thing etc etc. Subscription based is the new reality i.e. it costs lots of $ to keep software working on macOS and Windows and … 🙂 I’ve never used PhotoMechanic and no longer use Lightroom desktop; I’ll continue with shooting JPEG only and editing mobile only. It’s faster and good enough for me! #Ymmv