Photo Editing Software - Updated Post

I have been looking for an alternative to Lightroom and Photoshop - I don't do enough work to subscribe to their monthly payment plan.  I prefer to pay once and then that's that.  The old Photoshop and Lightroom do pretty much everything I need to do, but at some point, new cameras won't work with them.  So I've been looking at alternatives.  The latest one I decided to check out was Capture One by Phase One.  It was a bit too different and looked a bit more complex.  I also didn't see any benefit over Lightroom and Photoshop.  I Googled "Capture One vs Lightroom" and was reading articles about them as well as the comments at the end of the articles as many times there is some excellent information in the comments.  One comment mentioned View NX2 by Nikon and that he thought it gave the best results out of all of them for Nikon cameras (which I shoot).  Since I already owned it and it was free anyway, I ran some recent images through it and compared the results to Lightroom.  With very minimal adjustments the skin tones and color were more accurate.  So at least for converting RAW files to JPG, including adjusting exposure, contrast, sharpness, shadow and highlight detail, I think I'll be using View NX2.  However, it won't do local adjustments, fix flaws, remove unwanted objects, and all the other things that Lightroom and Photoshop can do.  The camera model won't matter if I convert to JPG first before working in other programs unless I make too many adjustments (save, make adjustments, import, save, make adjustments, etc.).

Here are two of the same photo - one done in Lightroom (bottom) and the other done with View NX2 (top photo).  In Lightroom, I could probably have played around with some of the sliders and gotten the photo to look like the NX2 image, but in NX2 didn't have to do anything other than making the photo a little lighter.  It should be noted these are not finished - just to illustrate the difference between the two programs.

Sometimes when you are researching one thing you find the answer to something else or perhaps discover something new.  I've had this happen fairly regularly.