This would seem the single biggest reason for the lukewarm review; having an experienced darktable user to tutor the reviewer would certainly have made sense. It has been my experience that darktable has incredible power and versatility, however it is not always easy or immediately intuitive in how to use that power and versatility.
I’ve been using darktable for more than two years (a lot less than some of you) and still haven’t come close to a thorough knowledge of each module, or each blend mode.
A raw-developer such as daktable is a complex piece of software with a steep and long learning-curve.
The article does laud the power of darktable’s parametric masks, but it suggests that it falls short of adobe’s offering because each mask can only bebound to one correction. Surely in darktable duplicating a module and then applying a different correction is functionally identical?
darktable is not professional, commercial software, with price-tag or subscription to match; It is FOSS. The documentation doesn’t hold your hand very much. It requires patience, practice and learning from others to gain in proficiency. But I wouldn’t trade darktable and the community we have here at pixls for adobe’s product, even if it came free-of-charge.