Photoshop 10 years behind - still!

Photoshop CS2 was announced recently. The link here to digitalphotographyblog, claims to revue the software, all I read is an Adobe marketers list of "new features", nothing new there I guess? What I find interesting though is the appearance not once but twice, the phrase "non destructive editing". I am flabbergasted, that this has been made public? I mean I have long know about this and it is something very easily, demonstrated to astute students, even on poorly calibrated equipment, it's, the destructive editing is not even subtle! So what's going on over at Adobe? Is Adobe gearing up for a major shift in how it makes Photoshop work? Will we finally see an end to it's memory hogging and wasteful practice of loading ALL pixels into memory, will we get a faster and more intuitive package that responds to the slightest gestural movement of the hand and pixel?

The new Camera Raw 3.0 workflow allows settings for multiple raw files to be simultaneously modified and batch processing of raw files, to JPEG, TIFF, DNG or PSD formats, can now be done in the background without launching the main Photoshop executable. Integrated, non-destructive cropping and straightening controls allow raw files to be easily prepared for final output.¹

I'm no soothsayer, nor a real industry pundit, but I'm not holding my breath for an application as graceful and elegant as Live Picture was nearly 10 years ago. Back then RAM was exepnsive, and processors expontentially slower, yet I could open a 200+ meg file in a fraction of the time Photoshop does it now. My editing was never final, I could always change anything to any degree, even after saving and closing the file, remember this was 10 years ago. Photoshop back then at Version 4 only had ‘revert to saved’ or one step of ‘undo’. Needless to say, this puppy won't be rushing out in the middle of the year and purchasing an upgrade of Photoshop, it's more than adequate now with what it does, and I've still got my copy of Live Picture running quite nicely on my Laptop thank you very much, when it comes to big fine art prints.

¹My emphasis source.