@John7 You have got it exactly right.
DxO had got themselves in a hole with PL5 metadata handling (in my opinion it wasn’t originally a particularly big one), principally caused by a lack of documentation at the very beginning, and then “listened” to what some of the users said in the forum and then started digging in that hole even more and have made it much, much worse!
My belief is that the DxO UI “police” don’t want the UI changed except when a host of new features come along. e.g. when PL6 is released. In particular they appear to be paranoid about making any changes to the preferences screens!?
As I suggested above a “simple” change to add a new field in the preferences would have enabled the following;
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An option to select what fields PL5 should generate when storing the components of an hierarchical keyword. In my opinion there was nothing wrong with the original, most complaints were that the user wanted no change to the data inserted by their DAM. But some of the complaints in the forum accused PL5 of generating an excess of fields so they changed the product!
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An option to use metadata from the DOP. Users got tangled up with the changes to the use of metadata from the DOP when PL5 started to put that data where is (arguably) belonged, i.e. with the image data (embedded or as a sidecar). Some users complained that they preferred to have to keep only the DOP and so we now have this new “kludge” and what a “kludge” it is, about the worst I have seen in 36 years in the I.T. industry. Yes I have made emergency fixes to a database or two in the middle of the night in such a kludgy way (with the customers consent) but never to an operational piece of software!
So far they have deprecated two “features” and we are expected to accept that the new way is better - well it isn’t and in both cases the new feature should have been added to the existing repertoire of features, with an option to select it or not, and not replaced a feature without a “by your leave”.
The sheer, unadulterated, arrogance is beyond belief!!?? @sgospodarenko, @alex