I like your style Rob. 
You think very much the same as I do about these things. I guess I'm feeling a little scared away from trusting LR5 Beta now after what I was told earlier and a few other posts in other forums. I am new to LR as I usually use PSE 10 and my own directory structure for organisation (which I still may use anyway and just use LR for faster/better RAW editing). I back stuff up constantly and automatcally so it's pretty unlikely any major bugs would cause me to lose work, but I don't want any bugs causing the end results to have issues that aren't immediately obvious. Pretty unlikely I'm sure, but I tend to worry a lot!
I'm going to install the trial of LR4.4 tomorrow when I'm back at my desktop PC, then in 30 days I'll look at things again, see if the status of LR5 Beta has changed, read a few more comments in forums about it then make up my mind what I'll do. Of course I won't then be able to import the organiser (or whatever LR calls it) into the beta, but.....well I don't know, I'll just play that one by ear! Maybe I just won't use that until I have a paid version, either 4 or 5.
Thanks for your input Rob.