I like your way of putting it.
For me, when I started getting interested in photography again after a few years ‘off’, I initially used my old copy of Ps Elements. But I’d never particularly enjoyed editing in Ps, and Elements Camera Raw was fairly basic. But I didn’t really know what I was missing.
Then I moved to Linux, and I couldn’t run Ps, so looked for budget (i.e. free!) and Linux-friendly alternatives.
I think I tried darktable, and gave up in disgust at the flat out-of-the-box results. (hard to believe now )
So I tried RawTherapee. That was better, I got a decent looking image, to start with, but I found I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my photos… personal style? How do you make one of those?
I was basically moving sliders at random, with very mixed results. And I found it complex, just in the sense of what to use for what.
I went back to shooting jpeg for a while. But somewhere along the way I found this forum, and liked the discussions happening on here. I found the darktable manual, some tutorials, and liked the principle of the structured nature of the scene-referred workflow.
[edit] I think it was finding some film emulation LUTs that sent me back to darktable for some reason. Not sure why… RT is just as good if not better at using those]
In hindsight, I think why I liked it was that I had no idea what I was aiming for, and the classic darktable scene-referred set up (and exposed but (mostly) fixed pipeline) kind of gave me a track to run on. I had a lot of fun (and some frustration) teaching myself slowly how to get jpeg-like results, then better-than-jpeg results.
I’ve tried RT again since then, and have used it successfully. But to me it does feel a little impenetrable, coming from my hard-won darktable experience. It’s not always clear to me what does what, how tools interact, (I do like the clear pipeline principle in darktable) and even what tool should be used to get a certain effect.
To be clear, I’m not at all suggesting that any of this is an RT issue, it’s just different to what I’m comfortable with.
And maybe I’ve moved on (in my mind) from having fun working out how stuff works, towards using that knowledge to improve my pics.
I think there’s an element of chance in all this, in terms of what I find myself using!