I use Lightroom and must say it is quite a learning curve for me. The interface is quite simple. You must go to develop mode to crop-red eye-adjust images. What took me a while to figure out is related to the non destructive changes. Anything you do in Lightroom is stored in a database but never applied to your images. To get the effect you want, you must export the images in a format (like Jpeg). If your images are already in Jpeg, you must still export them to the Jpeg format. If you say to export to the same format, changes are not applied.
As for the changes done to version 2, there are a few usability improvement, but most importantly, they added a super easy to use and powerful dodge and burn tool.
I feel it's so good that, unless I need to remove a telephone pole from the images, I don't need to go out of Lightroom.