And if the answer is yes, can it output a RAW panorama, like Lightroom can?
I don’t know whether Light Romm can output a raw panorama, but:
No, RawTherapee (with ee ending and no space in name) can not stitch a panorama.
I’m not aware of any program that can output a raw panorama… I’d think the best you’ll get is a DNG with tiff data inside, which is not raw.
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All I know is that when I stitch RAW files in Lr I get a DNG file that behaves JUST like any other RAW file. All the shadow and highlight information seems to be there.
Is that a raw DNG file or a demosaiced DNG file?
I do not know what the difference is. Im not that knowledgeable about technical stuff like this. As I said, the Panorama RAW files seem to behave the same that single RAW files do.
And no matter how it does that, that is what I am looking for in other programs. I dont really like Adobe, but I have not found a good replacement yet.
Rather than One Tool To Rule Them All, a la Light room, we have multiple tools that do specific jobs in the Foss world. If you want panorama stitching, check out Hugin.
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What does FOSS mean?
Does Hugin output RAW panoramas? And can I edit the panorama in it?
Free and Open Source Software.
It can output an exr file, which is high bit depth, or 32 bit tiffs. Again, no application I’m aware of is putting out raw panoramas. You cannot edit inside hugin, it is for stitching only.
So a 32 bit tiff behaves the same way as a RAW file?
No, but a 32 bit tiff has plenty of information to continue to edit it without much issue, generally speaking.
A raw file typically is data with the sensor pattern (Bayer, xtrans, etc…), that is mosaiced data.
I’m pretty sure the dng files you get from stitched panorama in LR is deposited data in dng container. Which means it’s not raw anymore, even thought it can still have all the original dynamic range.
Hugin can stitch panoramas and give you tiff output files with sufficiently high bit depth to retain you data.
Then you can further process the panorama in another software like RawTherapee to refine color, contrast, crop, whatever.
However the whole process might involve more from your part than the all-in-one solution from LR.
Hmm, that sounds kinda good… But also annoying as hell.
Im honestly finding it very hard to stop using Lr, even though I think the subscriptions are not great.
If you don’t understand the difference, then do you even understand what you actually want? Give Hugin a go and see how well you like it.
Hey, could you be a bit more unnecessarily condescending
What I want is a program that lets me stitch RAW files an output a Panorama that retains all the highlight and shadow details of the original RAW files. And I want to be able to edit that panorama in the same program too.
Basically, I want Lr to have a good competitor that can do all the things I personally do in Lr.
Your original question and intermediate answers weren’t doing you favors in terms of clarity I’m afraid. But now you have asked the real question, it can be answered: like others have said, Hugin is your best bet. It retains the dynamic range that is present in your input files. It can also do some brightness, contrast and color processing. It may be all you need. Really, give it a go 
This thread became a discussion on its own. All I wanted to know was “can this thing stitch” basically.
I will check out Hugin though.
You’re probably going to notice a bit of a difference in how things are approached with Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). We tend to have different programs to solve problems so we can distribute the work better and allow people to focus on specific aspects of the problem.
So where you might have a bunch of tools disguised under one “umbrella” (Adobe), Free Software is usually a series of separate tools. (It sucks, I know, but it’s a consequence of the community and the way they approach problems - this is a much harder thing to make better than any technical programming).
In our world, we generally tend to refer to Hugin for stitching together panoramas.
You seem to want to make sure that any intermediate file that goes from panorama stitching to devlopment/editing is as high a quality as possible. In that case, the 32-bit EXR file output from Hugin will contain all of your data. (there’s a caveat there about de-mosaicing raw files and a couple of other things, but I don’t want to overwhelm you if you’re not familiar with it).
Then, you can continue working on the EXR in something like RawTherapee when you’re done with the stitching.
In general, this sort of makes sense from a workflow perspective because you’re doing a bunch of pixel-manipulation to bend the panorama into what you want (geometric modifications), and once the geometry/perspective/view is what you want, you can focus on the colors, exposure, etc.
(Note: some folks may develop their raw files first and then stitch the output when they’re done - this is certainly a valid workflow as well and possibly better? I’d defer to @heckflosse to tell me if I’m wrong like normal, or just so-so wrong 
).
You’re mostly spot on, except the fact that RT can not read EXR. You have to use 32bit float tiff instead.
So I just stitched my first panorama in Hugin and I dont know if I did something wrong, but its REALLY noisy. Lots of color noise, especially in the shadows. I’m looking at the panorama in RawTherapee, btw.
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