I wish I could confirm that PhotoLab is at the same level as PureRaw, but they seem to be from different ages. Just watch the constant frustrations revealed in this forum. And professional assistance from DxO is like visiting a bitterly cold place in Siberia. Superficial and postponing answers is the dominating type of response. That’s why people with DxO problems meet here to be able to share a workaround with other PL7 victims (I speak from experience) . Then comes the integration and compatibility problems with expensive add-ons that up front should have been a part of PL7.
My benchmark is this: As long as I can’t develope my raw files in PL7 to a better result that obtainable with Darktable - I don’t need PL7. It’s not really surprising that Darktable winns as the tools and methods in Darktable are much more sophisticated (some elderly tools have become redundant or obsolete, but the 5 to 10 tools you need to care about with your pesonal presets are easily put in your personal menu - still not excluding you from the rest). I am sure this is the case with the free Gimp too, but I cover my needs with Affinity (still to a fair price).
Hey, Required. Perhaps I misunderstood you. 
I thought you were suggesting that the problem was that I had purchased my previous license from Nik, not DxO. And you are correct that DxO is using the argument that the new license invalidates the old one, which may be technically true. But DxO is basically saying “f**k you” to its customer base if they break compatibility with work created with previous versions and then blame the licensing scheme as the reason for not being able to help. That is the opposite of a customer-focused approach. Seriously, what is the downside to helping me solve a problem that THEY created? Instead, they’ve converted me to a former customer that will take every opportunity to discourage others from using DxO products.
It is not for culling and raw development, but you might try Radiant Photo for finishing your photos. It uses some kind of AI to detect the photo content and to apply changes accordingly.
I currently import my photos using Mylio Photos, where you can also cull your photos.
After that I load the photos in DxO Photolab and apply noise reduction, optical corrections, do crop and any rotation if needed, eventual bigger exposure corrections, if needed.
Then I export the photos to a TIFF file and load them to Radiant Photo. To me, it can give pleasing results with no work.
But for RAW development Radiant Photo uses the built in developer of your OS, which is not always pleasing.
But you can try it also with the OOC JPEGs.
My workflow is:
Photools imatch for culling and storage which it does really well. Recently came back with 4,000 images from a birds of prey workshop and culling was a very fast processs.
Photolab Elite with Filmpack for Raw processing which it does really well.
Affinity Photo for a small percentage of my images where I need to remove something or where I need layers.
I also occasionally use Nik Collection especially Silver Efex.
In the past have used Lightroom / Photoshop, ON1, Bridge. Really happy with my current choice of software which I have been using for several years.
@CybrSlydr Hi,
I went from Capture One 23 (after 6 years because of the new pricing) to DXO Photo labs 6 elite, but did not upgrade to 7, because of the moneytrap DXO seemed to be. “Elite” means nothing and you need Film Pack & View Point for full functionality.
I week ago I purchased a licence for around $50 to get ON1 2024.5 and I’m pleasantly surprised by the image quality and functionality. DXO seems to be years behind with development and I payed 20% of the price if I calculate that I paid 229 euros for Photolab 6 Elite.
I mean I can get excellent results in all named RAW editors, but pricing and functionality is important for me. On1 is as easy as Photo Lab, but offers AI functionality more (only if you choose to use it!) and this speeds up your workflow big time.
I use Topaz Photo AI as well! And the Affinity Suite.
David
OP, perhaps try Darktable? It’s free and runs on pretty much every O/S out there.
I have owned licenses for ON1 since 2018. Spend some time with it and you will find how easily ON1’s image quality falls apart at high magnification. There is a reason their viewer tops out at 400%. Don’t even think about extreme crops or retaining very fine detail. If you don’t crop much or print at really large sizes, ON1 is OK other than than the extreme amount of software bloat.
In my six plus years of experience with both ON1 PhotoRaw and DxO PhotoLab, the choice is simple. I use PhotoLab all the time and rarely use ON1. There is very little I can do with ON1 that I can’t do better and faster in PhotoLab I keep hoping with each new version of ON1 that it will finally blow me away, but instead each new version just blows. ON1 focus’s more on adding so-so new features instead of refining existing ones.
Mark
Wow! It must be bad if it beats DxO for failure to refine existing features. 
Many people seem to love it but I am guessing they don’t crop much. I also suspect, based on many comments I have seen over the years, that many of ON’s users don’t use a lot of their features on a regulars basis and may also have different expectations than I do regarding output quality.
Mark
For culling and sorting quickly, there’s CameraBits.com 's PhotoMechanic, which is specifically designed for culling thousands of photos quickly
There’s FastRawViewer from (cleverly enough) fastrawviewer.com
and Excire Photo at Excire.com
HTH
Unfortunately Darkttable dooes not read the latest Nikon camera raw files, such as Z8
I think if you’re used to LR (and doing edits quickly) PL might frustrate you.
I also have Affinity Photo and use it rarely for the reasons you outline. (There have been calls on the forum begging them to make a DAM app but I doubt they ever will.)
The closest LR alternative I’ve used (and still do) is Exposure X7 - especially with multiple computers pointed at the same set of files. It’s faster than any editor I’ve ever used once you get used to it. Because X7 hasn’t been updated since 2020 I use PL as a stepping stone DNG creator to work on files that X7 can’t really cope with. And that’s where PL really excels with their lens correction modules.
Exposure X7 has a number of quality issues and has been abandoned by its developers. I wouldn’t invest in software that hasn’t been updated in so many years. I trialed it in around 2021 and thought at the time that it had a lot of potential but there were too many image quality issues that I couldn’t ignore so I decided not to purchase it at the time. Given the fact that there have been no updates in years I’m glad I didn’t shell out the money. it’s a shame though, because as I said it had a lot of potential and somebody put a lot of work into getting it to that point.
Mark
I had a reason to email their support recently (April) and they got back to my email quicker than any software company I’ve ever dealt with.
I did ask them as well if there was going to be another release and got a vague response that their release cycle had changed. I’m not a coder so I don’t know what that really means.
I think it’s still good software despite the absence of any major updates. If they’re still selling it perhaps there’s room for optimism
My issue with LR is it’s incessant writing of metadata to the image file every time you send it out to an external editor. This has caused quite a few PSD file corruptions when sending out multiple files over Wifi via the 5MHz channel.
I now use Photo Mechanic. It’s expensive, but it does almost everything LR does, and much more, AS A DIGITAL ASSET MANAGER – for editing you need to send your file off to an editor. Collections are a bit clunky, but other than that, I’m very happy with its handling of metadata and file organization.
If you do event photography with thousands of files to cull after an event, you should look into PM. For the casual photographer, it might be a bit overkill.
Photo Mechanic is a good tool with a crappy-very old looking-UI. And now that they’ve decided to price gouge, it’s gone from my computer.
@CybrSlydr - when you worked with your jpegs in PhotoLab did you have any presets applied? I think if you “import” with “no corrections” set in Edit…Preferences it won’t do any processing at all on your jpegs - and you can do all the jpeg settings in camera. In my Nikon Z50 I have set it to apply a vivid preset and some sharpening - and in PhotoLab I have set “no corrections” for jpegs. (You can set the “import” present differently for raw images and jpegs). Basically my aim is not to do any software editing with jpegs at all. They just end up “in” Photolab because of the way my folders are organised.