No, it wasn't designed to do any advanced or specific task that you mentioned there. It was designed as an all-in-one / home base general photo management and processing solution.
When i was first getting into this stuff, i was like you and loved to spend time processing pics and doing all kinds of advanced stuff. But at some point, you start to realize that streamlining workflow, organizing, culling, and prioritizing / minimizing what to process and time spent on processing and publishing is important. And that's where Lightroom comes in.
Photo Importing and Management: The big thing with Lightroom is that it is a database driven photo cataloging and management system. You can automate all kinds of things on import from the application of keywords and other metadata to creating DNG backups and organize everything into catalogs. Can also scroll through your "day's catch", for example, an rate each image as you go along by simply typing 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 (as in number of stars). With a couple mouse clicks, you can gather all your 4 and 5 rated images for example and process only those. Basically, you can do anything with your images that you can do with whatever you normally put in a database. The organizing and querying capabilities are easy to use and delightful.
Editing and Processing: Since it has a RAW conversion engine built-in, you can work with RAW images directly without having to convert them first. And since its editing philosophy is to collect edits in a metadata file and not edit the file directly unless you specifically save the changes to the original file, it's nondestructive to your original file, and you don't have to make multiple copies (or restore points) of your files at various stages to preserve various versions of edits. You have an action / edit log for each image file and can go back / forth to any point in time -- all with the original file. You can also do this on a JPEG as well with no loss in quality, which as you know would be otherwise impossible without the transactional metadata editing log if you were saving different versions as you went along because of lossy compression.
It also has convenient "on the fly" batch editing features as well, where you can sync edits across any number of files. For example, if you like how you've adjusted the brightness, WB, sharpness, or NR in a particular pic, you can quickly select a bunch of other pics to apply it to, click sync, and it's done instantly -- all from a file browser type interface.
Publishing / Printing: With Lightroom, you can easily use templates to batch add of borders, watermarks, or text strings and batch upload selected images or catalogs (for example, "processed 5 star images" only) to flickr, picasa, FTP servers, etc. in whatever resolution and sharpness you want, and can output the same to your printer as well using whatever print/paper profile, resolution, and sharpness as well.
It's all about streamlining and automating your workflow, easily and quickly organizing and culling your pics, editing and publishing as quickly and efficiently as possible in bulk all from one program. It also works with export actions and Photoshop Droplets so you can apply complicated actions or a series of filters / plug-ins in Photoshop, so you can apply the power of Photoshop editing in batch form to extend the editing power of Lightroom.
For example, I have a set of standard Photoshop actions that include running Noiseware Professional (for NR), Portraiture (to smooth skin complexion), Shine (reduces shine / glare from skin due to flash and cosmetics / oil on skin), contrast masking / equalization to restore shadow detail, multi-pass sharpening and downsampling techniques, etc. that I can apply in batch to every image in a particular catalog / collection from within LR in a matter of mouse clicks.
