You are correct for many painters. Especially school students, hobbyiests, the inexperienced, the ignorant or the lazy (I say those terms not as criticisms, that’s fine if people are that way). But this is a gross assumption. Many artists care what their paints are made from. Quality and type of pigment has a huge impact on presentation, and longevity. The same analogy mostly holds for image editing. If you want to be a pro, you have to know your tools as best as possible, and learn as much as possible. You can use a housing analogy as well. Do you want your house built by a pro, or some guy who knows how to use a hammer but doesn’t know when to use long or short nails? Darktable tries to cater to the pro, those who are willing to learn, research their pigments and know the different nail sizes. A lot of commercial software, by contrasts, targets mass consumption, mostly of people who dont care about the pigments and want results fast.
The question of slider names has been raised before. I agree some things are unknown at first, but that’s why we learn. Darktable cares about the difference between chroma and saturation, for instance, whereas many other software will falsely call chroma saturation because it’s a familiar term.darktable wants things accurately named in a scientific way because it actually gives greater clarity when you understand the meaning of those things. I’m not disagreeing that some things are hard to understand, and if I was the dev id name a few things differently too, but ultimately I do not think you will get them to change their current philosophy. They rather things be correct than easy. And I for one like that. Not every software has to cater for the same crowd.