My experience of darktable consists of:
seeing my RAWs looking completely wrong
Googling wtf is wrong
Seeing a bunch of reddit/forum threads of devs telling people that it's a feature not a bug.
Going back to pirating lightroom
seeing my RAWs looking completely wrong
Googling wtf is wrong
Seeing a bunch of reddit/forum threads of devs telling people that it's a feature not a bug.
Going back to pirating lightroom
The point is darktable has terrible defaults and terrible usability to allow a novice user to convert the dump to a usable image. Images loaded into darktable are less immediately usable than default camera settings. This might be ok for experienced users, but it’s absolutely disastrous for newbs.
Actually, none of the RAW processors I've used (both paid and free) match my camera's defaults (2 different cameras). The paid one even had a dedicated page explaining why so that they could direct newbies to it.
There are a lot of cameras out there, and you cannot expect developers to figure out the curve to match the camera for all of them. That's why these SW let you specify your own default curve.
There are videos and forum responses explaining how to get a more appealing image, but the suggestions require a LOT of work and they assume a pretty deep understanding of color science.
DT is like a car that you can only drive if you know how how to tune each part of the engine. Otherwise, you just drive something that sputters down the highway.