I'm glad I'm not alone in how I feel about Aperture. I honestly felt like Apple designed that app just for me [I know, stilly]. But that's how comfortable I felt with it. I'm old enough I've developed and printed in real darkrooms, and have used Photoshop since it was 1.0 and Mac only. Aperture felt like the most natural app a photographer could ever use. I have far too many replacement apps, but none have made the process feel as smooth. I also have huge photo libraries in Aperture, and migrating them, making sure metadata is preserved, and all the things that could go wrong in that process - it's a huge task and I don't want to start it with an app I won't like [which is why I have been trying to migrate Projects into their own Libraries in Aperture, and then migrating the libraries into the other apps]. I highly miss the simple Vault feature. I have terabytes of data, and where I live, a very, very slow Internet connection [Backblaze will take at least 9 more months to finish a backup if I don't add more photos/videos to my drives - thinking about a stay in Erwin, TN as they have Google Fiber and while I'm not a fan of Google, I will gladly use their fiber to quickly upload this backlog!].
I know most in the industry have moved to Lightroom. I gave it tries multiple times [this was before Adobe went subscription] and being someone who has used Photoshop since the dawn of time, I was not against using an Adobe product like I am these days. It just didn't feel right though. And that's not something one can easily express to a developer - "your app doesn't feel right" is a lot harder to debug then giving specific bug reports or UI issues, etc. It did run on Windows so Windows folks got to use an app similar to Aperture - and Lightroom didn't require a monster machine to run on. But it never felt right. And now I've stopped using all Adobe products [not happy that Premier has overtaken FCP as I was an FCP v7 user who actually *loved* FCP X when it came out, though a few missing features were showstoppers on a few projects, but they eventually fixed that; I still like FCP X and worry about a day when it goes the way of Aperture. Since they have invested time in the iPad version, I am hoping it will stick around].
Aperture was ahead of its time, and very reasonably priced [even v1] at the time. It was truly a pro app and was deserving of the $499 initial version price, IMO. I would gladly spend that again on "Aperture: Reborn" if Apple decided to change direction. Phil was a big fan of the app, and he still works for Apple; too bad the App Store eats 80+ hours of his week.
He probably doesn't shoot photos any more due to lack of time and lack of a good app to put them in!
