So, by chance I stumbled into ART, again. While it has been for some time on my disc, I probably didnt’ use it since , err, last year 
- I mean, “I didn’t use it for a while”. My main editor has been DT for the last year.
I was tempted to give ART a second try, because it fits me style of editing very good. For the bulk of my pictures I do a quick edit, using only the tone equalizer, tone curve and a saturation curve (which is more prominent in ART than in DT and I like that very much).
So I took a bunch of edits from darktable, which I had invested a good amount of time into, as a baseline.
And I have to admit, the quality of the renderings in ART just blew me away. It’s absolutly stunning, what ART produces with a streamlined editing process.
Here are three comparisons. All are 1:1 crops to show the difference. Left is my original DT rendition and on the right is the ART rendition.
For the first picture I subsequently tried really really hard to mimic the clean look in DT (tried many variants of DoS, contrast eq, denoise, surface blur, astro denoise, sharpen, local contrast - with and w/o masks), but I failed. Here is not my final try, but the first edit I took as a baseline.
Next one shows the really clean rendition of the fine hairs.
And last is a closeup of an eye. You can see the fine color spectrum which art renders.
yeah
I do realize, this is somewhat a confession of my incompetence regarding darktable. But I have been learning the DT intensivly for over a year and I think I know my ways around quite good. Especially for the first picture I really believe, you I can’t reproduce this look in DT.
So, what do I wan’t to say with this topic? Firstly a big thank you to @agriggio for developing ART and providing such a fine piece of software.
And also, more importantly, an even bigger thanks to all FOSS developers, providing such a rich spectrum of photo editing software to choose from.
THANK YOU.