Not only that, but a number of the core engineers on it were hard core photographers - who started working on this specifically because bridge/photoshop was clunky to work with.

It's also fast - one of the reasons I went with it over aperture early on is because I was working on a lower power machine, and aperture wants beefy. I actually run lightroom on my little msi-wind running snow leopard for doing photo work when wandering around (the wind fits in my smallest camera bags, the laptop, not so much)