Before I came to LR Classic / CC / Photoshop I was with Aperture and the Nik Collection (which I bought from Nik but luckily for $169 vs it's previous $500 price tag). Then as we know, Apple pulled the plug on Aperture and Google acquired Nik (I believe to plunder it for Snapspeed), only for Nik to go into the ever increasing Google Graveyard. In their drive to dumb OS X down to iOS for Mac Apple pushed Photos for Mac which I find largely useless (and a mere shadow vs Aperture) and all this pushed me, after probably too long a wait, towards Adobe. Having come over to the Photography Plan (something I wish I'd done sooner - was just too lazy to re-catalogue 60GB of images LOL, all done now and thankfully my last major project is out of the Apple ecosystem) I find the combination of the three apps extremely powerful.
Back to Nik software and the one I do miss is Color Efex. While LR and PS could likely achieve any result I need I found that Colour Efex could produce some great results easily. It's that I miss at times. I've not yet tried to see if my 'Googled' Nik will still work with LR, I'm guessing it might not, if it doesn't I'd be very reluctant to pay DXO (given the state of play) again for Nik given that they seem to have done little with it and, for all we know, DXO's Nik might be around for an ever shorter time than the Google version. This is the reason I'm now looking to Luminar as an alternative to Nik. I certainly wouldn't use it to replace LR. I still have concerns over Luminar though, the debacle that is their long running promise of DAM (that keeps getting extended) is one such concern. I think many bought into Luminar on the basis of their 'coming soon' strap line, only to still be waiting a year + later and with no idea whether their current version of Luminar will run the DAM (if/when it comes) or whether they'll need to pay again for a 2019 version. The Windows version I'm also told is pretty lame compared to the Mac version too. I've heard many folks say they want the, again 'coming soon', parity with the Mac version, not just filters that are called the same but don't do the same thing.
What would be ideal is if Adobe did a Colour Efex style add-on, at least Adobe is big enough as an enterprise to 'have legs' and not fold the app or the company a year after you've bought it. For all the bitching about the Adobe subscription model, personally I think it's tremendous value. So I'm still interested in a Colour Efex alternative, it def won't be the DXO offering and, lacking a crystal ball, I'm not totally sold on Luminar either
Decisions, decisions.