acdsee, at least a few years ago when I was using it for large volume jpg commercial work, is fast and often good enough. The trickier stuff went for a spin in Photoshop.
Lots of photo editing workflows could be done in something like digital fusion which is free. You just have to use roto instead of painting masks, but the procedural graph workflow is more precise. It would also handle anything in a numbered sequence automatically so batch processing is trivial.