Photoshop was, and will never be designed to work with more than a few images at a time. If all you need to do to say, color correct 200 images what would you do with photoshop? You would have to open up each one and do them individually. Just think how long that would take, and it's only 200 images! Not only that, but photoshop is destructive. You have to go through a million steps to
not destroy your image. That slows you down and can create confusion for when you need to undo something.
Or you can open them up in a RAW workflow program and do all your levels, curves, brightness/contrast, hue/saturation, Grayscale mixing, etc, all simultaneously with 200 images in about 20 minutes tops. If the lighting was completely different for each image, than yes of course it's going to take longer, but it still will be a drastically shorter amount of time. And guess what, Good RAW workflow programs are completely nondestructive. They just do instruction sets
over the image instead of actually changing the image itself like in photoshop.
Photoshop can do alot of things, but it can't do everything. As a photographer, CS2 is the
last program I use when I'm doing post-production. The other 80% of my workflow is done in Lightroom and other misc. programs.