@ Kiwi.

I still haven't figured out how to delete individual history edits. I can delete them all but not one in the middle of the pile. Of course Ctrl-Z(which funnily enough hasn't been tampered with ) deletes them by chronological order.

Also when I use the term 'intuitive', I meant as a total noobie to image editing.

Intuitive as in open the program and begin to edit without the need to refer to the help file/manual.

trying to do the same kind of localised(or spot) brightness adjustment as you get with CNX(or the use of Colour Control Points) is much harder with all other editing programs(not just LR or PS).

I did forget to mention the use of the graduated filter tool I used in my image(with LR) where I created a graduated filter and darkened the sky a little, but it didn't affect the steeple roof of the church.. that was cool.

At more than 50% zoom view though the LR version of that image has a green halo(approx 2-5 pixels in width) around the roof of the church where the darker roof meets the brighter clouds in the sky. Not present in either ViewNX or CNX versions.(so I don't know what I did wrong there in LR).

Also about the intuitiveness of the program, they use terms that don't makes sense to me.. mainly as to what they're supposed to do.

Clarity??? of what. The image already looks clear. do i want to make it 'more clear'? ... conversely is there any reason to make it less clear?

First time I've ever heard of the use of that term in photo editing circles.

The Crtl = issue would be a non event if it were not for the fact that they used Ctrl + in an earlier version of LR that I tried, which must have been v1 many years ago when I tried the trial version. Back then I hated the manner in which it rendered my images looking quite flat and ugly where the Nikon programs used the camera settings... Standard with all tweaks turned off. and then some of the NEF file handling was not good, such as not editing the NEF directly and not saving the edits made to the NEF(that's quite important to me for 'posterity').
So I haven't tried it(LR) for a very long time now.. 2years.. and to see my edits on the NEF file are now remembered is good.

It'd be interesting to hear from someone that's never tried CaptureNX, to see if the change in workflow is as severe as it is with going from CNX to LR.

Speed may well be a beta thing running on old hardware.. slow ram, slowish hard drives.. etc.

I have set cache to a separate drive as with all other image editing programs I've ever tried(and where that option is available too. That's a good speed boost for most programs.

Andrew mentioned that CNX is a resource hog.. which it is, as my 25M NEF files will take up as much as 1.5Gig while editing them(via task manager.. CNX shows 1.5g of memory in use) and that's the heaviest editing with many multiple edit steps active and NR and all that.
With simple edit steps, as I feel my way across the program, I see that LR uses 1.1Gig of memory(at the most so far) but that was whilst about 10 edits were made in the history sidebar, and then converting to jpg. The conversion to jpg had the cpu at 100% for longer than I've ever seen any other program(that hasn't crashed) using cpu cycles.

FastStone is very quick VNX and CNX are quicker(at both TIFF and JPG conversions) Bibble was also quick at jpgs.. about the same as V/C NX's but much slower at TIFF conversions.
The caveat here is enabling noise reduction in CNX.. that slows down conversion to jpg massively if the image hasn't been saved as a NEF already. That is: if you apply NR with CNX, if you save the NEF it takes forever to save. once the NEF is saved, the jpg then converts in less than 10seconds.. less than 5 in most cases(I suspect it's a matter of how much detail is in the image)

Converting the NEF to jpg with LR3-B2 without any editing at all is far too long for my patience. beyond 5mins(counted) and I think about close to 10mins! CPU stays at 100% all the while.