A decade ago when I was using a DSRL camera, I organized all photos though Adobe Lightroom. I liked how I could set up collections and I ended up creating a catalog containing all of my photos, including scans of old photo albums. The catalog also has all the edits that I did to the photos and I really liked the non-destructive aspect of it.
I am looking to get back into this, and want to organize 10s of thousands of photos, some of which will be in a RAW format that I want to edit. I know that lightroom will work well for me, but I really don't like the idea of being locked in a catalog. I believe there's an option of sidecar files, but that option is unattractive to me because it would just clutter up the folder storage.
I'd love to hear some suggestions.