Greyed out is not nearly good enough. Greyed out is a distraction and an eye sore.
Some of us are more design-centric and design sensitive than others. How anyone can work in Lightroom astonishes me. Every minute spent staring at that program is an excruciating episode of teargas level aesthetic pain.
Those of us who chose PhotoLab for its strict aesthetic and elegant minimalism are not here to subsidise its bastardisation at the hands of people with very limited commercial sense. The Nik v2 update couldn’t have been handled more poorly: overpriced while forcing PhotoLab users to acquire a second license (my thoughts have been clearly expressed elsewhere for new users the offer is fine, for those who owned only Nik v1 the offer is great).
What is clear to me at this point – even though I do occasionally use Nik – if there’s not a simple preference to remove the Nik buttons (as there are options to remove Facebook, Flickr and the rest of the social media noise from export), I will be hard refunding my Nik v2 upgrade along with the PhotoLab Elite upgrade I purchased at the same time for my second copy of PhotoLab Elite. I say hard-refunding as apparently DxO support tries to pretend that its 30 day money back guarantee doesn’t cover activated software. Another bottom-feeder strategy with which I couldn’t disagree more.
I’ll also start planning an exit strategy as I want nothing to do with a company who will push in-application advertisements on paid users and who is willing to compromise their paid users workflow for their own (minimal) commercial advantage.