I don't particularly feel like learning a new editor and haven't dived into Gemstone. Where it lacks is with exposure blending or making a composite, but their Gemstone software, also included in the package, is made for that. Actually, it will get me through almost everything I do in Affinity Photo. It is nice to have auto sky select in Acdsee. I typically like to adjust the sky and landscape separately, and C1 makes that easy with layered curves and either masking by hues and/or luminosity. Then, if you need more advanced editing, you go into the Edit module, which will create another file, roughly the same size as the RAW. The development is just basic, mainly global targeting. Their answer to this is by their modules, and it's just a workflow change for me. So forget about having a color edited one and a black and white virtual copy. If you do anything more than basic exposure editing, it will create a whole new copy of the file. The thing that drives me nuts with it is no virtual copies. Little things like that I need to learn, stuff that was intuitive to me in C1. I then wanted to see all yellow photos, so I clicked on that like in C1, and it showed me all yellow photos from the whole catalog.
For example, last night, I imported photos from an outing, went through and color tagged my yellows, throw away as red, and ones I finished editing as green. It does have a color editor similar to C1, so I like that. I have been using Acdsee, which I am not totally sold with.