This whole thread is goldmine! HoweverI feel I need to add my input here regarding recommendations for 1st time users.
There are things that need to be addressed in general community, especially in the way 1st times consume the information present to them. My main gripe recently started being YouTubers with easy-to-follow tutorials: they are very easy to consume, the edits come swiftly and are rather eye pleasing, however they are lacking whys, in-n-outs of decision making and sometimes make outright wrong decisions/recommendations.
Recently (couple months ago) when I was deciding what to do in edit, i saw recommendation for basic adjustments module that “will be available in dt2.8/3.0”, so I decided to check out the PR request that went with it and saw the… well… that it wasn’t a best decision all around but it stayed. However the thread predated the video and all recommendations were very well documented on rather avoiding it. There was no remark of that in video.
Then again, another youtuber (or i might’ve been article) compared darktable and lightroom making either deliberatelly wrong edits with darktable or just simply copied all other wrong advise into one.
And then again, recently another community member presented one operation done using wrong module using “all roads lead to rome” argument and the fact that with dt there are more than 1 way to kill a bird and got too defensive (imho), again with no whys behind the decision of using that module or limitations one might encounter when trying to replicate steps…
Overaly the problem might be with quality vs ease of consumption for darktable. Granted - darktable isn’t easy (nor should it be), but “getting started” + “ins, out & whys” should be both easy to consume and understand without creating wrong habits and showing wrong decisions. How to do this? Personally I feel like “resources” tab in dt website should link and endorse good ones with difficulty rating + we should be able to “debunk” wrong ones 