You are right about the limited need for keywords outside local environments like a personal archive or in smaller companies up to global enterprises or for that matter organisations of all sorts. BUT, they are absolutely essential when it comes to a rational and effecive way to handle a picture library. You just can’t do without them. It is fantastic what a difference they make in a tool like iMatch for fast searches without the need for typing at all - just selections - where the keywords are used as so called “cathegories”.
Doing something like that in Photolab would not be hard at all since almost all of it already is there in the interface.
So, I don’t really believe in something spectacular will happen with the PictureLibrary in Photolab BUT that doesn’t really matter because no other RAW-converter is a better and more seamless match with thirdparty DAM than Photolab and THAT is an indeniable strength, advantage and sellingpoint for Photolab. If you really want to scale up scale up and get a really efficient XMP-metadata workflow all the metadata maintenance tools are there in iMatch.
Nothing gives a better image quality today than Photolab and it is a seamless and rock-solid match for consuming and displaying iMatch XMP-data that have supported all but one of the 25 XMP-metadata fields/elements that I use right out default. Just update and maintain the metadata in iMatch or even in PhotoMechanic if you have your XMP-metadata life there and Photolab will instant display the changes by its excellent synchronization.
This really leaves the metadata maintenace environments both in Photolab PictureLibrary, Adobe Lighroom and Capture One is the historical dust from an ancient time.
There are a lot of people out there these days looking for alternatives to Lightroom and a ever more gready Adobe so I would love to see Photools and DXO join in a good and mutually benificial market partnership by offering attractive bundles with DXO products and iMatch. That could be a really European killer alternative to a technically tired Adobe and CameraBits that developes PhotoMechanic.