I find that 'Fast Raw Viewer' works really well at the front end and you can set the program to launch Affinity Photo for editing.
I really value Affinity's ability to edit single photo's without having to first fire up a session, catalogue or other complex and restrictive front end management systems.
So while cataloguing would be nice I really hope we don't loose the ability to quickly edit single files and to work without a catalogue when that makes more sense. This is one of the attractions of Affinity as opposed to being one of the cumbersome frustrations of other well known editing software.
D