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
Wow. Okay.
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:
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.