How to justify the expense of Photoshop

It is clear to me based on the last 5.5 months that my interest in advancing my knowledge and skills of photography is not going away any time soon.

I spend a fair amount of time watching YouTube videos done by those with the expertise that I wish to acquire. They all use Photoshop and treat it as though it is as essential to the craft as a camera.

My goal is to streamline my post production work flow so I can spend more of my discretionary time shooting.

I have Lightroom, love it (except for its performance), and plan to use it as my workflow home base. I have Elements 10 which frequently requires me to convert to 8 bit .tiffs to perform the functionality I desire and send it back to Lightroom.

The odd thing is that if I did spend the money on Photoshop I would still want to design my Lightroom workflow so I used Photoshop as little as possible.

To me Photoshop is primarily designed for people creating images from scratch while Lightroom is designed for those processing photos. In spite of this all serious photographers seem to have Photoshop.

Given what I have said above what are my reasons for spending $519 on Photoshop CS6? And does anyone have any thoughts on how long it will be for the next version since I know that upgrading is not cheap either?

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Florida