The over-all impression I'm getting is that there hasn't been very much
development work done in this area by avid photographers. I think the whole
cataloguing issue goes back to the way *nix systems treat drives.

ACDsee does have some editing capabilities, ones that are sufficient for most of
my needs. I also have GIMP installed on both my windows and Ubuntu boxes but I
can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to use GIMP to achieve the
results I want.