rumplestiltskin
Mu-43 Top Veteran
The 32GB of RAM you have is, indeed, the sweet spot for Lightroom. Add'l RAM won't help LR but would be useful if you regularly run other apps concurrently. If you are not currently using an SSD for boot and apps, that will surely help. If you have your photo library on an SSD, as well, that will help even more.I've done the upgrade to Catalina. I use Lightroom and have close to 65,000 images on an external thunderbolt drive. I'm experiencing no problems, at all. So far, Catalina has been just fine. I've only used Photoshop one time, but it worked fine. All my Adobe Creative Cloud apps are the latest version. I realize that there are reported issues, some are even from Adobe, but that seems to be more for legacy products that have 32 bit installers, etc.
As to the original question, I've been using Lightroom Classic for quite a while, and while I like what it does as far as working with RAW, I've noticed the last few upgrades seem to be memory hogs. I have 32GB on my i7 iMac, and I often find that it's chewing up 20GB of that RAM. I'm thinking about ON1, but haven't pulled the trigger.
I've played with On1, ExposureX4, and Luminar as possible alternatives to LR but I keep coming back to LR as being the most complete, professionally oriented, and convenient DAM/Editor (or Damn Editor, lol). I find Luminar to have nice tools but as an addition to LR; perhaps things will change once v4 arrives. Exposure's processing pipeline is fundamentally ass-backward from the get-go so I've abandoned it.