So, I've been through all of the foundation course videos for On1 Photo RAW 2020. The software impresses me in many ways, but irritates me in others. The courseware is not particularly good ... It has little sense, to me, of building on the fundamentals and expanding your understanding of 1) how the app operates and 2) how to use it effectively in a good workflow ... It's too much "Oh and you can do this this way and it's really cool" rather than "here's what this does, and after you do that try this or that to get to the next step..."
The toolset is scattered (literally) all around the UI and not well organized in flow or order of use. I have spent a lot of time trying to remember which edge of the window to look at to find the next tool I need to use. Etc.
The long and the short of it is that I think it's a decent app but I'm not thrilled with the UI, the tutorials, or the workflow at this point, after four days of study and practice. It's not by any means intuitive or simple to get a simple task done. It seems to make some difficult tasks a bit easier if you're willing to forgo actually understanding the details and just slap a "style" on, then tweak that until you get something you like. But that's not the way I tend to work. I develop my own 'styles' from first rendering principles, and I need to understand how the app works in terms of where it's storing its information and what it's doing to my files.
The long and the short of it is that while I don't think On1 was wasted money, it's not getting the job I need done. Time to move on to the next contender and see whether it does me better.
Meanwhile, I actually have a couple of projects that need to be done now. I guess I can use Lightroom Classic for a couple of months and see whether it still works the way I expect. Of course, Adobe will do their damnedest to try to pull me into their Creative Cloud thing, which I have no use for whatever. Sigh.
I actually enjoy the challenge of all this, but there comes a point where I just want to my work done and stop futzing about with awkward tools. LR perpetual license did that for me for a very long time...
G