Excuse us if the tone is a bit harsh, but you’re not the first confused beginner to think they know better…
The best advice I can give you here is to forget everything you know and embrace the darktable way. It’s clear that the issue here isn’t actually that darktable’s UI is inefficient (it mostly isn’t), but that you don’t understand it yet.
Don’t know which you have watched, but there are a lot of not very good ones as well as outright outdated. With only a few exceptions, any video that’s based on a version before 3.2 or so should be ignored. And if it teaches curves or levels it’s probably also not something you should learn from at first, since they are effectively legacy tools with much more powerful alternatives.
The only channels I will not hesitate to recommend are the following:
- Boris Hajdukovic
https://www.youtube.com/@s7habo
No one knows darktable better than him. - Bruce Williams
https://youtube.com/@audio2u
Has done a very good job of “annotating” the manual. He has a full series on masking that you should watch. - Aurélien Pierre
https://www.youtube.com/c/AurélienPIERREPhoto
Former developer. Typically very technical videos. - Darktable Landscapes
https://www.youtube.com/@DarktableLandscapes
His Lightroom background shows in places, but solid technique for the most part.
There are others, but they can be hit or miss, so start with those above.
This tutorial covers the editing fundamentals you must know (there are some important differences from Capture One) and shows you how to only see the “modern” modules:
This old article could also help you to understand some of what is going on:
There’s a lot of “history”, certainly, but I assure you there’s sense to the madness.
That depends on what the slider is for. So that doesn’t make any sense.
You don’t need it. A common mistake among new users is to think that you need very precise masking. You don’t. Just roughly select the shape from inside and use feathering to fill it out.
Each module is already its own layer and they get applied to the image in the order they are shown (just like layers in Photoshop). What you describe would only complicate things, and, it seems to me, not even fit with how the darktable processing pipeline works. And once you have created a mask, you can easily reuse it in later modules.
Fully agree on that one. It only causes confusion.