Adobe just bought out the excellent RawShooter Essential/Premium company to
supposedly incorporate its technology/engine into Lightroom...so...assuming
Adobe doesn't entirely screw it up...and assuming they bought it to actually
USE it, rather than simply to smash the mostly FREE competition...it could
be very decent.

I'll wait and see because for one...I already have RawShooter Premium and
I'm happy with it.  They'll have to significantly improve on it, or perhaps
make it seamlessly FAST for use with Photoshop...and then I'll be
interested.

I just hope they don't anihilate its ease of use and straight-forward
interface...

-Mark²

I have Raw Shooter Premium, along with a few other converters, but use them
less and less. The general reason that I find stand-alone raw converters
somewhat unsatisfactory is that, at least for my non-professional habits,
the global adjustments that one can make to an image in a stand alone
converter are rarely enough and regional adjustments to part of an image is
still required in Photoshop. While some adjustments initially seem easier in
some raw converters I have not found anything that cannot be duplicated in
CS2.
The specific problem I have with Raw Shooter Premium is that the appearance
of an image in its preview window is significantly different, particularly
with regard to contrast and gamma but not color, than how that image looks
when it is opened in CS2. Since I print from CS2 and my color management
routine provides satisfactorily predictable results RSP is often not worth
using. Bibble, Dx and Nikon NX do not show these shifts in image quality
when opening the image in CS2. Nikon NX with its control points may be on to
a new and usable interface for image adjustment but I see it as a work in
progress.
From a marketing standpoint I really do not understand why Adobe would want
to insert the functionality of Raw Shooter Premium into Lightroom. My
limited experience with Lightroom has me wondering how Adobe plans to market
it in relationship to CS2. My major impression of Lightroom is that it is
merely Bridge on steroids. Lightroom has a nicer interface for making
limited global adjustments to groups of images made in a studio under
identical lighting conditions but I don't immediately see what you can do
with Lightroom that you can't already do in CS2.
I suspect Adobe also is not clear how they can market this product and that
is why it is out there as a free beta. Adobe might have thought they needed
to have something to compete with Aperture but that ill-starred product is
not likely to survive due to bizarre programing and marketing by Apple. For
example how could Apple release Aperture at the same time as the Mactel and
not have a  version native to the Mactel OS--as of this writing the number
of programs that run native to the Mactel OS makes those Mactel boxes the
most overpriced and underwarrantied  Wintel clones in the marketplace.