So far (a couple of days of beta, a few weeks before that in a pre-beta "focus group") I have found Pro 3 more stable than Pro 2.5 - which is of course saying as much as 2.5 as it is about 3.0. So far, no hangs during import, but I've only tried import a few times - until recently, I was only using 3.0 on files previously imported with 2.5 (or even earlier).
As for comparisons to LR, I've only used the latter during a trial period a couple of years ago - not the current version. So while I'm somewhat familiar with its capabilities from that experience (and discussions here and on orher forums), I can't really give a details comparison. I can say that as of 3.0, it's very similar, with the most obvious difference being that ACDSee is happy to work with any file on your system whereas LR requires an explicit "import" into its library. So ACDSee is easier to test the waters with. I imagine once you've totally committed to a LR-based workflow, the import requirement would cease to seem a big deal - newly shot images would be imported when copying from the camera anyhow, and everything already on your computer would already be imported.
I'm sure there are significant differences, but without knowing more about what you do with LR and what features you especially like or what limitations especially frustrate you, it's hard to say what differences you'd notice. The basic model is simialr with both - see a bunch of thumbs, quickly browse them, rate them and add metdata if desired, use a non-destructive edit mode as desired that automatically remembers your settings and doesn't require you to convert RAW to JPEG if you don't feel like it, maybe do some batch operations like copying settings from one image to others, or taking a bunch of RAW files and generating JPEGs for all of them (for web display, perhaps) - that sort of thing.
Im currently trialling lightroom, and find the workflow reasonable... but as i am a newbie at both DSLR and Raw processing im learning on the fly as fast as i can! i like the convenience that JPEG out of the camera gives
I'd say the whole point of programs like both LR and ACDSee is that shooting JPEG provides no convenience advantage to speak of - you can work directly with your RAW files without the need to convert them to another format. Sure, you need to generate JPEG versions to share with others, but you seldom want full size versions for those cases, so even if you shoot JPEG, you'd probably be generating reduced size versions for emailing or web upload. Generating these from JPEG is no different than generating them from RAW.
So if you are seeing a significant difference in convenience between RAW and JPEG with LR, I'd say you probably using LR the way it was meant to be used.
i have 17000+ shots from my old P&S and have been very rigid in the folder structure used, and am keeping that with the K20 also, so i find lightroom a bit irritating with its auto stacking etc.. is this something ACDSee does also?
ACDSee doesn't have stacking, period - that's probably one of the major limitations it has relative to LR. But on the flip side, it is totally "transparent" in terms of its view of the filesystem - basically any file organization system that works for you can be implemented within ACDSee just as easily 9far more easily, actually) as with Windows Explorer. ACDsee doesn't try to hide the filesystem from you or force you into one way of organizing things. It does have its quirks that reward you for organizing things in certain ways more than others. But it's also a very powerful file management tool, so if you do decide you want to make some changes to your organization scheme that involves moving files and folders around, it's a great tool for that purpose.
does ACDSee also support the likes of something similar to lightroom profiles (also discussed in this section) for a generic 1 click hit develop?
ACDSee has its own camera profiles, optimized to produce the results they think "best" by default - they make no special attempt to exactly mimic whatever the camera's own JPEG engine might have happened to have produced. So if you standard for for excellende is what the camera would have done, absolutely no room for the possibility that someone else might have a better idea, or that you yourself might want to override the defaults as often as not, ACDSee is not the best tool. It produces great results using its defaults, but they aren't necessarily exactly what the camera would have done, nor are they necessarily exactly what I'd want if I were to custom process the image.