There's an interview with Lightroom's chief designer Mark Hamburg at Since1968.com:

The volume problem really hit home in the fall of 2003 when I did my first shoot of nearly 500 images in one day. The things we?d been experimenting with like light table simulations just fell apart in the face of that sort of volume.

Even after that, we kept resisting getting into hard core image management for quite a while because it would pretty obviously eat up everything else we wanted to do and we felt that Adobe had already explored image management with Photoshop Album. We capitulated eventually and it did indeed consume vast amounts of attention and resources and probably could have taken even more if they?d been available.

So that?s my partial defense for why it?s taken so long.

Funny. I've always felt processing and managing pixels were two sides of the same coin. Let's hope they get it right in the end.

Via Sean McCormack.