Adobe Lightroom

Its well documented here how much I dislike forums. But that's really unfair. I dislike people, mostly. I signed up for a year of Adobe Lightroom, and the first thing I discover is I am disallowed from editing RAW photos without first importing them into a catalog. I search for a way to bypass this asininity, but most of the "answers" are that I will eventually LOVE this forced workflow. And the other "answers" are that its SOOOOOOO EASY to import, edit, export and delete from catalog that I won't even know I'm importing, editing, exporting, and deleting from the catalog.

Assuming I'm not as smart as the engineers at Adobe (and I'm beginning to question that now), what's the point of all that? No, seriously?