KC Honie

Following (in red) is a note that I sent to Serif.  Because of the Capture One subscription debacle I eventually left Capture One (after trialing a number of apps) and went back to Lightroom and Photoshop.  After installing and using photoshop it is apparent how far behind Affinity is falling.
I like to say that the core of Affinity Develop is already done in Affinity Photo, simply strip out the develop module and wrap a DAM around it and you are ready to go.  Then your raw engine is consistent across the suite of your photo manipulation tools.  That is the reason that when switching back to Lightroom it only makes sense to move back to Photoshop as well.
Serif didn't bother to answer, just crickets...
****************************************************************************
I am a retired investment banker, strategist, marketer, and now photographer / creative.
As I am certain that you are aware Capture One was popular in part because they had a robust perpetual licensing model (plus a fantastic product). Many of the same reasons that Affinity apps are very popular.  I use the full suite of Affinity products.
Capture One has made a move to force users into a defacto subscription model and ANGRY does not begin to explain the sentiment of the ~50% of users that are perpetual licensees.
Opportunity
The opportunity for Serif is for "Affinity Develop", an application that is a competitor to Lightroom, Capture One, DxO, etc.  While not a trivial task to develop, the core is already done in Affinity Photo, simply strip out the develop module and wrap a DAM around it and you are ready to go.
I would hope that Affinity Develop (as I like to call it) is in actuality fairly far along. Now would be a GREAT time to "leak" that news.
Threat
The threat is much more subtle, like many C1P users I am now looking at alternatives such as DxO, LR, Topaz Labs, RawTherapee, and Dark Table.
If people bite the bullet and return to Adobe (I am an Adobe refuge from the subscription licensing model) then not only do they get Lightroom but also Photoshop and LR for iPad. Thereby depreciating Affinity Photo.
I am personally trialing all of the app mentioned above. It would be fantastic to have a complete Serif Affinity suite including "Affinity Develop".  Roundtrips between it and Affinity Photo would be much more elegant than between Capture One and Affinity Photo.

I am now all in with creative cloud.  I will check back on occasion to see what is going on but for now the Affinity apps are gone from my system.
Had there been a reasonable LR alternative I would have stayed but that is not going to happen...

Although I'm not a programmer, I briefly worked in the I.T sector in the early 2000's (Tech support for Symantec as well as web design in the early days of Wordpress).
Adobe acquired what is now Lightroom many moons ago and rebranded it (I use to use it's original iteration back in the day).  From what I can tell, Lightroom uses base core functionality of Photoshop.  Affinity already has AP developed and it would seem to me at least that integrating certain core features from AP2 and combining an SQL Lite engine for the cataloging aspect would seem fairly straight forward (But I could be completely wrong).  Again, I am no programmer but given all that I've seen in this field as a photographer for over 35 years now it seems that a committed group of coders could make a LR/C1 type app a viable reality. All it takes is enough financial resource and maybe that's the roadblock for Serif at this time. 

The difference is Adobe has a very good RAW converter. Affinity doesn't (yet)
Then again for a catalogue program what you really need a good database system. (Unfortunately, SQLite isn't particularly good.)
However, in principle you are correct. Take modules from A Photo add a database and a UI....
With the interface to A-Publisher, it will be a winner for people like me who do magazines and books.
Where you have the "Stock" interface to Pexels and Pixbay just add C-Cat. A winner.
 

I chose to go with C1 because IMHO the raw engine is much better than Adobe's and I prefer AP to PS.  But to your point I pay a premium for using C1 instead of LR.
As primarily a photographer, I am keenly aware of the library features of both LR and C1.  An application such as PS or AP is not useful for a high volume photographer, you have to have the basic DAM functionality of LR or C1 (et al).  I think most photographers are also very much aware of this.
I am not sure why Serif has not created "Affinity Develop" to compete with the other RAW developers out there (the RAW developer functionality is already present in AP, write a DAM already!!!).  But that in my opinion is the huge factor in photographers not switching to Affinity apps.
If C1 keeps raising prices like that are then I might head back to Adobe...  Then PS would also replace AP on my machine.
Edit:
As an aside, I don't think Serif has any intention of releasing a LR/C1 competitor.  It is a glaring hole in their lineup and should have been released concurrent with Affinity Photo.  There is some strategic reason for not competing heads up with Adobe that we are not seeing.  Very unfortunate...
 

Not only was it on the roadmap, but they were actually working on it.
 

Actually it's Peakto which looks interesting for cataloging purposes, so thanks for sharing.
Currently it's only "photo photo photo" again, but there's a roadmap…
https://trello.com/b/yx5ePR2u/peakto-public-roadmap
… and Affinity compatibility is on the list of planned features:
https://trello.com/c/97yOuXMZ/48-better-integration-with-affinity-photo
This is the one DAM to keep an eye on!

Meh.  There are apparently enough Win-only DAMs you could choose from…
Besides, Affinity was Mac only for years, too. Things can change.

The short answer is no...  Serif uses LibRaw as the core raw handler then wraps its own develop algorithms around that.  
AP is certainly not as good as LR, C1P, or DxO...

The "killer feature" of iView/Expression Media was that when creating a catalog of assets, you could simply drag and drop items from all over your computer environment, including network, CDRs etc. iView would catalog the metadata and create a thumbnail so that the object remains represented even if the original is unavailable. Additionally, you could also define watch folders that would automatically add all new content to the catalog. On Mac, iView was even smart enough to follow your Finder actions if you would move files while the catalog was open, and update the path accordingly. If it lost track of a folder because you may have moved or renamed it, you could reset its path to a new target.
Then, with the catalog content, you could create as many hierarchical "catalog sets" as needed regardless if the items were "online" or "offline".
This flexibility remains unmatched.
There was also a rudimental image editor, but meh, why bother if there are real bitmap editor apps? In fact, Expression Media still works alright with Affinity (on Mac v1 only, of course) in that regard, as you can set any app as your default editor for a specific file type, plus you can also add custom editors, so that I could always open bitmap or (generic) vector files in my catalogs directly in Affinity apps. Also via drag and drop, for that matter.

Which is possibly why we haven't seen a Lightroom /DAM from them so far?
 

I want to pop in here and ask, are people happy with how Affinity Photo handles RAW photos?
My old copy of Lightroom handles RAW pictures a lot better, so much so that I never use Affinity Photo for anything RAW.
Their RAW processing needs to become a lot better if they create a Lightroom competitor.

The good thing about Lightroom is the images stay where they are (and are not touched)  and there is a Library catalogue file.  
Even if the catalogue fails (and the metadata sidecars)  the images and the file structure is unchanged.

NeoFinder is not available for Windows. Like it or not any program like this needs to run on both Mac and Windows.

Voilà:
abemeda.de
Hehe, searching "every catalog file" whose "Kind is not Folder", I get 3,000,458 items as a result… It takes a while and some happily spinning beachball to list them, but eventually they appear. It's not just assets though, I'm also cataloging discs and disks, some bootable disks even including hidden system files. 2000 catalogs in total. 

I have been using NeoFinder as well.  It keeps reasonable track of my 1.25 to 1.5 million graphic assets.

It was just an example, Bridge being the closest to a "proper DAM" that Adobe has to offer.  
Of course, I have Bridge with the CS5.5 installations on my old Macs. I've never used it as a DAM though, usually only for batch changing or applying XMP metadata or for specifically previewing/inspecting Adobe documents.
As I have noted many times, since over a decade I'm eagerly waiting for a Mac compatible successor of the conceptually brilliant but functionally dated iView/Expression Media. Haven't found one yet, although some are getting close and now even can display the Affinity QuickLook thumbnails.
In that sense: 
Serif, please give me a modern iView Media knockoff! 

I am sure they will continue to work on photo, designer and publisher.
However, a DAM is essential for most photographers. It is also essential for designers and publishers.
This is why Adobe did Bridge.   I think Affinity could do one as well. IT is not just tying the apps together as they do that already but the assets.
If you don't want it, then don't buy it.
However, Lightroom is a photo cataloguing system which is a specific DAM. The mapping and web galleries sections are very useful.
There is nothing else like Lightroom out there.   Some one mentioned AcDsee but that has a DAM capability as a small part of the app.
As Affinity has Photo they could use that as the editor.  However, as others have said, Affinity needs to improve its RAW converter, which helps everyone.
Again, if you don't want it don't buy it.
Affinity have said they won't do an HTML/Web program which is fair enough.  I doubt they will do a video or audio program, but a DAM is an essential but missing part of the suite they haver.
 
 

^ emphasis mine.
In exactly that sense, as a graphic designer (and not a photographer) who makes excessive use of the whole suite, I'd expect Serif to complete the suite of apps with a proper DAM, not just a "DAM for photographers". 
In other words, asking for a "Lightroom knockoff" doesn't make sense in the full Affinity context. If anything, it should be a "Bridge knockoff", but then some.

Bingo

Nope not at all, you are simply being pedantic and not listening to what people are asking for, I want Serif to complete the suite of apps (that 5 years ago they said they would do).  I don't want a LR clone, I want develop module with a DAM, that conforms to Affinity standards, not Adobe's standards...
In fact I am back to LR and PS.  I will no longer use AP because it is not integrated with LR like PS is

I use Lightroom for cataloguing and either Lightroom or Dxo Photo Lab for conversion.
I don't use Affinity Photo for RAW conversion.,

I don't disagree, but it has to be seamless, it cannot be a clone of Photoshop and Bridge...

It saddens me to see a defeatist attitude here. Like there's no faith in their ability to produce such a product. I believe they have the resources. Perhaps they should stop focusing on such a niche product as an iPad version because face it, iPads are toys, not real production machines. Then they could leverage code from Photo to do processing. Most of the work would be database management, organization, tagging, classification whether manual or AI-assisted. There's free tensorflow models for object recognition already out there. Netxcloud uses it. A lot of the code that Affinity needs to make a DAM is already present in Photo. But Photo has no DAM capabilities. I don't really care if they just give Photo DAM functionality and add the missing bits. But I think it's better if they have a fourth product, this way they can decouple the development and be more agile in making changes to one or another according to user needs and priorities. Why does it make me sad to see people arguing that resources are an issue? Because Adobe started small too. And they are such a behemoth company because they built up their products slowly but surely. Let's not forget that Adobe also bought Macromedia back in the 2000s. Serif could explore the option of acquiring a competitor or it could just build from scratch but using Photo source code for the most part. It is not easy but there's no denying that Serif is now pretty much the only serious multi-platform non-subscription option for Photo editing that resembles Photoshop but without the crazy price tag. I don't believe in this line of thinking "they can't do, they don't have the resource". It's all about prioritizing and planning to make money with a product lots of people want vs wasting time on an iPad version that is crippled from the start because the hardware platform itself is crippled by Apple and their inferior OS paradigm. Agree or disagree, there are people needing and willing to pay for a Lightroom alternative. I tried CaptureOne Pro 23 and it's abysmal - it can't even play Sony A7IV XAVC videos. It can't even play DJI Mini 4 Pro HEVC videos. It's slow. Serif has a golden opportunity to obliterate the competition here. It sits on a comfy chair and lets someone else take the lead, it will regret it forever.

Welcome to the forums!
Can't speak for Serif, but consider that this would be one more thing on top of what they are doing already and probably would have a negative effect on their ability to continue to develop the products they already have on the market, so it probably can't be justified given that there is a lot more competition in that space and users are already complaining left and right about features that are missing in the products Serif has released already.  Serif is a small company and their developers are already spread thin with the products they are currently maintaining.