Capture One Phase One 9.2 extends support to Pentax K-1 and Nikon D500

If you want to keep access to multiple states, versions/virtual copies are a better way (than going back and forth between two states via a history palette).

That's what I use undo for. Undo is the tool recover from mistakes. And if you talk about uncovering mistakes that are older, how do you know to which point in the history you have to go back to, how do you know there even is such a state? It's trial & error, the same trial & error could be applied to just going through your adjustment sliders and disabling what you think might be the mistake.

If it's about finding a previous export state (or other non development related operations), then it's quite easy, as LR shows.
Conversely I don't think it's particularly easy to perfectly re-match a previous, long forgotten curve adjustment, for example.

It is factually wrong to argue that the equivalent functionality of this feature is available through workarounds. Variants, for example, is a useful feature but not as a substitute for a History palette. At best, it is a kludge. The parametric nature of C1 is completely irrelevant. And suggesting multiple uses of the Undo command as an equivalent is completely missing the point of how the History Palette can be useful.

"It is a way to learn the behavior of an editor by stepping through a list of all your edits and seeing the visual results."
You can already do this now, just reset/disable each adjustment tool one by one. Or quick and dirty via cmd/ctrl-Z, ie, move a slider, see what changes, undo it again. Then move to the next tool.

Re: 2) Thankfully undo works over many steps. Just hit undo multiple times until you are back to where you want to be. And why is creating variants ridiculous? They cost very little in terms of disk space. If I had to choose between an application that offered variants and one that offered a history, I'd find the former much more useful.

Maybe I just don't apply as many adjustment steps as you do. My guess would be that very rarely go above ten. While I am editing an image, I am pretty much fully aware what adjustments I have already applied.

Re: 3) Aperture is a bit better than C1 in that all adjustments are in one single column, ie, you can see all edits in one single list (and don't have to go through multiple tabs). In a sense, this is a list, just one that shows slider positions graphically instead of 'history list' that shows numbers.

I am not as familiar with C1 yet, but in Aperture when I copied adjustments from an image, I'd get a window with a list of the adjustments.

I don't want to say that a history doesn't have its uses. It does show ones own decision tree. But my main point is probably that relying on the history betrays that one is still following the editing workflow from before parametric image editors to some degree where (a) the order of adjustments applied mattered and (b) creating versions was expensive (in terms of disk space). And in regard to order, I pretty much always apply adjustments in the order they are listed in the tool list because I think this order makes a lot of sense.

I appreciate the thoughtful response, noirdesir. I think that you are correct in speculating that you are making fewer adjustments to your images. I also wonder if you aren't making one adjustment per tool and then moving on. This would make it easier to tell where you are in an "undo-only" workflow. I often tweak a single setting multiple times. That makes taking bigger steps backward in a single click much more useful to me. It also makes it harder to tell where I am without a History palette.

I'm still struggling to understand the connection you are making between the order of adjustments and the usefulness of a History palette. When I'm using LR's History palette to step back multiple steps, it is often to compare different settings of the same tool. For example, vignetting. I may try four different settings. I find it very useful to jump immediately between any two settings to see an immediate A:B comparison. There are other ways to do this but none are as fast or convenient.

(continued) As far as variants being ridiculous, I didn't say that. :-) I was trying to convey that creating a variant every time I thought there was a chance that I wanted to step backward to a particular point in the editing process would be inconvenient and leave me with a confusing collection of virtual copies to manage and delete. It's just a much more cumbersome process than being able to click back and forth on a concise list of edits.