Hi MEB,
Thanks for clarifying. I get that, and I always used Bridge + Camera RAW + Photoshop before I had LR. The difference is that when I have gone through that process with Camera RAW I still have the same RAW file (which I can open in any other program) + a puny xmp file of a few kb that allows me to go back and tweak the developing at any time, continuing right where I left off. I just assumed that Affinity worked along the same principle and was very surprised to find that in order to save my edits in a form that allows me to go back and continue to work on the photo where I left off, I have to save in a format that is an order of magnitude larger than the original RAW. Seems like a very odd solution to me, and I'm afraid it will disqualify an otherwise very nice program as my first choice.