What is the crowd's opinion of Apple Photos?

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Also, check out the official website at https://www.apple.com/osx/photos-preview/

Scroll down to "The moment you’re looking for, always at hand" and select "Albums". You can see the "Faces" album at the top left.

Not sure what you meant exactly, since I don't use iPhoto. Here are albums in Photos: https://www.apple.com/osx/photos-preview/images/view_albums_large.jpg

Source: https://www.apple.com/osx/photos-preview/

Wow. Okay.

1. You can get Lightroom "Standalone" at the bottom right of this page. Gets added to your cart, checkout and you're done. (Of course they are pushing the subscription model, so it's harder to find the standalone, but it's there...)
2. It doesn't matter in what language you get it, it's a multilingual app that you can change the language in the preferences panel.
3. Apple will not replace Aperture with something of the same seriousness, they've already released Photos and that's all you're gonna get from them. Lightroom really is the way to go. Version 6 is just around the corner (a matter of days), so you shouldn't get the version 5 at this point...

Of course, I would argue that you have some kind of irrational aversion to the subscription model and that complicates things for you immensely.

I haven't used Aperture at all, and it's been several years since I toyed about in a trial copy of Lightroom, but I can think of reasons to avoid both of them:

• Aperture's dead, man. :( https://www.apple.com/aperture/ now redirects to https://www.apple.com/osx/photos/
• Lightroom 6 (perpetual version) is currently ~3x the price.
• The introduction of Lightroom CC suggests that LR 6 may be the last standalone "perpetual" version. I could be wrong about that, but to me the risk simply isn't worth it. I'm not willing to end up paying an ongoing subscription for Adobe's software.
• Installing Adobe anything means installing Adobe Application Manager, which means having to remove it again some day, which is difficult enough that the process left me vowing to never install anything Adobe ever again!

At least you can adjust Levels with the Photos app. It's not quite curves but you get at least a part of the way:

https://www.apple.com/osx/photos-preview/

Scroll down to the section titled "Take control of the finest details" and you'll see a Levels control.

Edit: based on the description, it seems like you can only do tonal levelling, not per-channel, but I'm not quite sure.