My two cents on this particular image;
First of all that is a really beautiful photo. It’s a also a great example where you don’t really need PS.

But why you thought you had to amputate that branch is difficult to understand (other than deliberately showing a limitation in LR).

It didn’t work, even in the small photo here it doesn’t look good. That’s not a stab at neither you or LR, just a weird decision in my opinion. 🙂

You did a great work with the people on the bridge though (as well as the rest of the photo).

Also, when is the LR Mag coming to newsstand and or Android? Juuuuust kidding!

Not sure what you mean by “buried”. It’s in the “Performance Hints” page that is linked to the main FAQ for Lightroom (http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/performance-hints.html?sdid=KBQWU). And Victoria Bampton also mentions it in the performance section of her “Missing FAQ” ebook. IIRC it is often mentioned in various forums when performance comes up. Maybe these guys are all wrong. As you say, if things are working fine, no need to worry about it. But performance seems to be an issue for a lot of people (ask Scott why he uses Photo Mechanic for initial grading of his sports images instead of Lightroom). Understandable that Adobe may not highlight this. Despite running an overclocked i7 with SSD and raptor drives, I often had multisecond (5 or more) rendering delays when moving from image to image in develop. Things improved when I removed lens correction, noise reduction, and sharpening from my import preset (saving them for later).

LR on PC is very sluggish using the clone / heal tools after you’ve applied Lens Corrections. I couldn’t figure this out while I was trying some retouching earlier this week, then found a lot of people are complaining about this. You have to turn off the Lens Corrections in order to have usable clone / heal at present. And this is on a quadcore 8GB machine.

Sounds like you have it figured out Steve. Though certain things can make LR work faster than others, I’ve not found (on any aged machine and I’ve gone back to machines 6+ years old) order to matter. Especially not to matter enough to make “workflow” even more confusing by introducing a specific order to do things. The only place I’ve seen mention of slower performance if you do Lens Corrections or Sharpening first is in a document that’s buried so far deep on Adobe’s website I have a hard time believing it’s that important.
But hey, if it works for ya, go for it 🙂

I think where the order does matter a bit is in the preview rendering speed. Some changes (e.g. lens corrections, sharpening, noise reduction)are more computationally intensive and can slow down re-rendering of the preview for subsequent adjustments. This can make Lightroom seem sluggish, particularly on older machines. I try to do these adjustments last.

Thanks John. It was a beautiful area. Lots of fun to photography, although the spray from the waterfalls made it nearly impossible to get photos without water on your lens. I probably went through several towels that day wiping the mist off 🙂

Thanks for the great post – they are always of value to read!

Yep, I changed it. How’s that for service 😉