I'e never used Lightroom or photoshop but went to C1 from Aperture 3 when Apple discontinued it. Personally I thoroughly enjoy using it. as you've said, it has some real power to do some creative stuff, but also does the basics very well. I used to enjoy tone mapping / HDR in specialist apps but I tend to do this far less regularly because of the power of the highlight and shadow sliders as well as the layer features - especially the gradient layer, so easy to apply and then adjust with same tools I'm used in C1 normally. Definitely worth adding a custom tab in the tools area and dropping your most used tool blocks in there. Mine are, from top to bottom:
Levels (gives histogram while also easy to adjust the levels)
Exposure (exposure, contrast, brightness and saturation)
White balance (the ink dropper is so good for clicking on a point you know to be grey - though presume all apps have that these days?)
High dynamic range (highlights, shadows, white, black - all very powerful, without being overbearing)
Metadata (to remind me the details of the shots)
Some workflow things that I find really useful:
1. Select -> Select next when -> star rated (fly through images setting star ratings first time through, 1 star to delete, 5 star to focus on)
2. Get used to the new quick shortcuts (hold down any letter or number key to the left of the keyboard to bring up a slider: Q= exposure; W=contrast... A=highlights, S = shadows; Z clarity... Takes a bit of getting used to but saves needing to move your mouse over to the tools panel at all.
3. linked to point 1, have a smart album at root for all 1* images. Makes it easy to delete all of them in one go (be careful to avoid 'delete from album'. The image still stays in the catalog, but won't appear in that album. If it's the only album you have the image in, you'll need to go through the whole catalog to find it again to delete it properly.)
