Here's my consistent take on it:
Lightroom is not a DAM, although it has DAM capability. Lightroom is a relatively full-fledged RAW processor packaged in an easy-to-access interface (with Capture One Pro being more advanced in most regards).
Affinity Photo (if that's what we're talking about when we say "Affinity") is a stand-alone pixel-level image processor with minor RAW processing capability. It's much more akin to Photoshop than it will ever bear a resemblance to Lightroom. I purchased Affinity Photo with the goal of replacing Photoshop. For that purpose, it has excelled perfectly, even though it's not always perfect. For better than 90% of the tasks I need to do, it does at least as well as Photoshop, and is often easier and more effective. For this purpose I have adopted Affinity Photo full-time for where it performs best — as a replacement for Photoshop. With v1.7 things are going to get even better, from what I can tell so far.
Part of the problems with all the answers in this thread is that there are so many conflicts with what a DAM actually needs to do. A majority of the answers are that "it needs to be like Lightroom," when a full-fledged DAM needs to be able to do much more in the way of digital asset management than Lightroom is capable of. It will need to have the cataloging capability of Lightroom, while having the cross-application access of Bridge, along with other features and talents.
I'm sure Serif has their own out-of-the-box ideas on what a DAM needs to be for their use with their own Affinity applications that include Photo, Designer, and Publisher.
Honestly I'm not sure why this is such a long-standing question. Any real professional media production suite needs a lossless DAM for managing versions and editing history. And integrating a RAW processor is critical to its success. This is a no-brainer. Just look at all the big names, present and former: Lightroom, Capture One, Aperture (R.I.P.), even Apple Photos and iPhoto before it. Apple doesn't use the finder to manage photos and videos, why should we? Adobe Bridge was good enough until the Library/Catalog database concept replaced it. Bridge still dumps dozens of near duplicates on your hard drive, and should your sidecar files ever become separated, good luck. And Managing RAW files in the Finder or Bridge is a lesson in frustration.
Let's stop trying to reinvent the wheel here. A database DAM RAW editor tool is essential.
