I’m wondering if you tried Adobe .dcp profiles for your camera in RT. I use profiles for my Nikon Z6 and they easily give me better tonal range and colors as compared to DT. And I save a lot of time and efforts since .dcp get me 90% of what I want to do with photos.
Camera profile + a nice tone curve and be done. That’s it for the bulk of my pictures. Yeah, some minor corrections (dimmed highlights, sharpen the eyes, a bit more pop, more denoising,…) here and there, but alone with profile and curve you can have a picture match the SOOC Jpeg.
I’m doing this with darktable. I created a camera profile with Lumariver (highly recommended piece of software!) and an IT8.7 color target (from Wolf Faust) and I replicated the tone curves from Adobe camera raw and Capture One in the tone curve module.
I find it hard to understand how one can be happy with the standard input profile matrix from DT - I mean, the colors have obviously a good amount of deviation from profiled color 
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I have Canon and Panasonic. I tried ready made DCP profiles. I still didn’t like the coloring of the photos in Rawtherapee. I don’t have this problem in Darktable, and it takes me literally a minute to edit in a scene-related workflow
Everybody has it’s own way. And I’m not going to argue, that mine is better in any way.
My main motivation is, to get (more) accurate colors, especially in skin tones.
edit: and I think, a matching camera profile is probably needed for this
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Of course, everything is a matter of taste.What I like about Darktable is the ability to reduce the color saturation in the lights. Then it is fantastic to see, for example, sunlight illuminating an object.
I have two programs installed on my computer. I like to edit the photo in DT and RT and then compare the results 
Visually, I prefer RT, but I like the image quality better in DT
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I do not have Windows nor Mac, only Linux computers. I guess I can’t run Lumariver.
then you can use DCamProf
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I have 3 programs built from sources: ART, RT and DT. I spent some time pixel peeping results between them and somehow like the ones from DT the least. Even though I want DT to be the first - overall it looks like a quite well made product. Though I’m not professional in any way. I just want my travel photos to look good, using OOC jpegs as the starting point. I watched a lot of videos from various well known DT luminaries like Bruce Williams and Boris Hajdukovic but still do not fully understand how to get good colors and tone from DT.
Of course its also hard to even say this sort of thing as being a DT or RT look…there is no one look… I have way less experience in RT but I have used it often to expt with profiles and try out things…often even more so in ART than RT but the DCP files give one look if you have its tone curve added and another if not also I think its the base table can be enabled or disabled and then on top of that I suspect many people use the automatch tone curve or tone curve in RT and depending on the model used with that say film or other setting again the result is very different. DT can have filmic with flavours, sigmoid, basecurve or none on top of a provided or custom icc and a further color tweak with the colorchecker feature of the CC module it also can use DT chart to create a lut to match to a jpg or color chart and there is a script called colormatch that can use a raw and jpg pair and create an icc that provides a nice match …so there are many ways that each program can start off… its just a matter of what suits everyone best and also decisions made by both sets of dev teams about starting points…
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I’m wondering if I can set focus and local contrast in one D&S module? Do I need to duplicate a module? Is it possible to overlay two presets in one module? I don’t think so because each preset requires a different slider setting. On the other hand, when I enable two duplicate D&S modules where I focus in one and local contrast in the other, my computer refuses to export the photo.
You should check the logs on the console. You may be running out of memory, and/or your OpenCL driver could be causing issues.
Share one of your "disappointing " edits from DT. Maybe the group can share suggestions. Also checking out a few videos by @s7habo you should easily see how to add and control color… I see that you say you have watched his videos which are pretty comprehensive so I guess showing an example is as always going to be the most informative…likely on a new thread though…
My hardware is Windows 10
Intel i5 4590 16 GB
GeForce GT 1030
I have Open CL enabled.
You may not have enough memory on that NVidia 1030.
Please run darktable from the command-line, and use
-d opencl
as the command-line argument. It should create a log file:
C:\Users\your user\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\INetCache\darktable\darktable-log.txt
Please upload that file here.
The system does not recognize the command d openc1 I have 2 GB of on the graphics card. This may not be enough for several D&S
modules.
should be -d opencl nevertheless for sure 2GB is too low. I think the recommended min might be 4 and realistically these day 8 or more is a good choice esp if the raw files are large
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I played around today and compared the image sharpened in CE and D&S, I see no difference. I think that if I don’t over-sharpen there will be no artifacts. In addition, in CE I can do sharpening and local contrast in one module, I stay with CE
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I also find Contrast Equaliser as my favorite module, but I also use D&S for some cases.
I even do most of of denoise with it because I can control the details I lost.
Yeah, I like that also. But last week I stumbled across the astrophoto denoise module and I find it does often a better job, regarding luma denoising, than the contrast eq. Give it a try
denoise (profiled) also allows fine-grained control based on detail levels (using wavelet curves, just like contrast equalizer does).
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