Great point, there are certainly lots of external factors having their say as well. I’m not sure how to phrase this question, but when darktable uses the “sRGB colorspace”, is that something internal to darktable itself, or is that something already on my machine that it is looking up? I’m on a pretty standard Windows 10 install.
When I was researching my problem before making this post, I found your article on color management very helpful Article: Color Management in Raw Processing As I understood it, if my display profile is the same as my export profile, and the export profile stays with the exported image, when I view the export and RAW with the same display profile, they ought to look the same. That’s why I’ve been trying to make these comparisons in darktable itself, under the assumption that doing so is the most consistent way to approach this.
When it comes to stuff like this, I tend to assume that I am doing something wrong, or have some part of my system configured wrong - not that I couldn’t be the first person to discover a novel software bug, but it seems unlikely that I have done so compared to the odds that I have the wrong settings chosen or am missing a file somewhere on my computer…