They've built a language for distributed ledger platforms based on Haskell with defined state transitions based loosely on traditional contract law. For exactly the reasons you've mentioned, this makes modeling the participants, rights, and obligations of a smart contract use case incredibly efficient.
Whether smart contracts are useful or not remains to be seen. There seems to be a lot of potential in the finance and supply chain worlds.
When thinking about DAML it makes me wonder how impactful something like Cobol was in reality. Definitely found use and even long term value add, but transformational? I don't know.
I'm not even sure what the technology comparison should be for DLT without DAML. There's only so many use cases or niche areas where it's valuable.