Hi Nik,
thinking about it again, I wanted to come back to one of your statements above:
“RAW Power 3.0 will be a front-end for the Photos library, but there are a lot of limitations imposed by Apple.”
Though not even having tried ACDSee, I would be happy to discard that idea completely if Raw Power 3.0 was not only to be a front-end to the Photos library (I take it you refer to the Apple Photos library), but it could also serve as a front-end to a folder structure on your Mac – similar to what ACDSee has to offer. Ideally, any generic metadata such as keywords, rating etc. would be stored in a way that they could be accessible to other photo DAM apps as well, while Raw Power specific editing data could still be sandboxed as today.
Why this idea? Well, I don’t think that it is a good idea to use Apple Photos as one’s repository for raw files, especially if iCloud photo library is being used. I would need to extend my storage plan from 200 GB to 1 TB, and I fear that the whole thing might get very clunky.
Best regards,
Erik