I am a user of Lightroom and because of Adobe’s move to the creative cloud, I envision a time when they will make lightroom unavailable as a perpetual license and only available in the CC cloud. They already limit updates if you are not subscribed to the CC cloud, like I am. That will mean I will be stuck with a copy of Lightroom that can still be used, but will never again be upgraded unless you are a CC subscriber, hence an old frozen version. I will NEVER go CC. I resent any software company making me rent their software for an annual fee and I will reject their software out of hand no matter how good it is.
I have thousands of photos processed in Lightroom using XMP sidecar files. If I revolt from Lightroom and go to Rawtherapee (a fantastic raw developer, by the way), all my raw files as developed in Lightroom will not carry over to RT since they use a different sidecar format (the photos will show up in RT, but the develop changes will not} , hence my question. I know that the RT development team does plan to change over to XML at some time. I am just curious if there is a timeline when this might happen.
Jim L