I believe all of the Affinity products are still on sale....$25 each.
Hard to beat at that price, $25 each for Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher.
I got all 3 for desktop and also got the iPad versions which are amazing what they can do even on a 2017 iPad Pro!!!!!
(focus stacking about 20 RAW images from a 5D3 on Affinity Photo on an iPad Pro 10.5" 2017 model...took only a minute or two...no crashing, and did quite a good job!!
I have to imagine it will do amazing stuff on the new M1 iPad.
But I digress.
I love Affinity Photo on the desktop too. I came from Photoshop and the concepts are all there, just the keyboard short cuts and some ways of doing "common" PS things are done a bit different.
I find it frustrating the lack of documentation and video tuts that show many of the things I commonly did with PS. One thing I REALLY hate, is that you can't simply alt- hit your pen on your tablet to select a color for the paintbrush...you have to actually drag it a bit to select the color.
Not a major thing, but it really slows me down when I'm trying to paint out something in AP...with lots of tiny sample and paints to blend in, etc.
However, there's more to love about it to me than hate.
It has been built from the ground up with new processing engines....and in many ways it still out performs PS.
So far, it has all the capabilities I used PS for. Only recently has PS, to me, made improvements over the CS6 version I left off with that would have had me consider upgrading it.
I do NOT like the *rental* model that Adobe went to, I like to pay for my software, and decide when I feel I need and upgrade, not to pay for it perpetuity and never at least own a license.
Affinity Photo, I bought years back and they've been giving free upgrades all this time. I kinda force maybe when they get to 2.0, there's rumors that they may charge for that update. I'm sure they'll give current users a discount....I'd pay when I needed the upgrade.
But I like that I don't RENT my software.
Now, to the original question....AP is pretty much a direct replacement for PS.
But it is not an LR tool....just like PS is not a LR tool. You use these pixel editors to do the heavy lifting on an image(s)...compositing, really detailed replacements, pano/focus stacking...compositing.
For RAW work, which for most people is about 99% of what they do...a LR replacement would be like On1 RAW or Capture One (I have both, I'm currently doing more in C1)....these have cataloging functionality, which I feel is very important for organizing. I do most of my work in there.
Anyway, like it has been mentioned here already, most of these tools have a free trial period, give it a whirl....if you've used PS or LR, you have the basic concepts to use pretty much another type tool....just some key shortcuts or workflows might be a little different, but as long as you know the concepts, learning or remapping keyboard shortcuts isn't rocket surgery....just take a little time to develop me muscle memory.
Hope that helps.
cayenne