It’s a case of diminishing returns. Shooting raw is a huge and obvious improvement if you want to post-process in almost any way. Conditional on that the workflow should be as smooth and simple as possible. Abstract controls like "clarity" are fine if the result of adjusting them is tangible and almost always does what you want. Giving the user lots of knobs that hardly have a visible effect (let alone a desired effect) is not an improvement.
Almost no professional photographer will care about the intricacies of the demosaicing algorithm, or the choice between a dozen different denoising modules, and Lightroom is entirely correct in not giving you a zillion knobs to adjust things that have no effect on image quality except in the rarest of cases. In 99% of cases the controls that matter are:
* Basic exposure/shadows/contrast etc
* Curves/levels for more control if needed
* White balance
* Cropping, obviously
* Cloning/healing brush
* Simple knobs for sharpening and NR
* Level/perspective adjustment
* Lens aberration correction (most of the time no manual input needed if the lens is in the batabase)
> Shooting raw is a huhe and obvious improvement if you want to post-process in almost any way.
See, you are saying “want to post-process”, which to me says that there is a different priority present rather than just “simplicity and ease of use”.
If the priority is “making the photos look the way you want them to look”, then we are in a territory where it is not as simple as “this tool is easy to use and therefore a better choice than that tool”.
You can want post-processing, but also don't want to spend 50 hours to learn a tool. Sometimes you just want "make it look close to the in camera jpeg, but let me adjust to exposure"
It’s not binary is the point and the whole reason I asked the original commenter why put premium into simplicity and ease and then immediately violate that by shooting raw.
When is the priority not “making the photos look the way you want them to look” ?
When you say “simplicity and ease of use” I think that includes taking the photos, and if I can defer some decisions that might make the overall process simpler.
Almost no professional photographer will care about the intricacies of the demosaicing algorithm, or the choice between a dozen different denoising modules, and Lightroom is entirely correct in not giving you a zillion knobs to adjust things that have no effect on image quality except in the rarest of cases. In 99% of cases the controls that matter are:
* Basic exposure/shadows/contrast etc
* Curves/levels for more control if needed
* White balance
* Cropping, obviously
* Cloning/healing brush
* Simple knobs for sharpening and NR
* Level/perspective adjustment
* Lens aberration correction (most of the time no manual input needed if the lens is in the batabase)