Currently I use Midi2LR to control lightroom’s sliders using a midi controller, much like this video. This is the only feature stopping me from using RT, as it helps me blow through editing the major features of most photos without RSI and with greater intuition. There are ways to send MIDI data using an app like TouchOSC and a tablet, so a dedicated musician’s controller isn’t necessary. I’d like to make a feature request for this, as it had not popped up in any search of this forum or other photography products, sadly.
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A crossplatform Floss Midi2 -Darktable /-Natron /-Blender /-Krita /-Gimp would be a huge improvement for a professional workflow. 
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MIDI control is sexy but I’m not sure it would be a leap forward or good use of software development effort. If I think about the way I spend time doing a photo, and this is just me of course, moving a slider or pressing a button is quite quick. Then you have to give RT a chance to re-calculate things. Then you have to decide if you like the effect, or do you need more etc, and I find more time goes into this step than moving the slider. Especially if I go to the History and click to the previous state and back a couple of times. So speeding up the “initiation” of the change is only a small-ish part of the overall time I take. I do one-off photos usually, and don’t work “production line” style like a pro might need to, however.
Also there are many controls in RT - I wonder how all these might map to a given controller.
If I’m adjusting points on a custom curve, would that be easier via MIDI controller knobs and buttons?
In terms of bang per buck, there might be better ways to streamline RT. For example, clicking the previous History item causes a re-calculation. Perhaps RT could cache the previous few states like I think Photoshop does. (Although I haven’t properly tried the before/after windows feature, and I doubt I’m the first to suggest caching…)
Andrew
RT does not cache the intermediate results of processing steps. Though there are some exceptions, like preprocessing and demosaic, which of course are cached to avoid these steps in further processing. In fact, using a recent cpu (mine is a 3 year old 8-core Bulldozer) going back and forth in history is snappy for most of the tools. But, speaking of this, there’s at least one thing which I should improve: It’s the unnecessary preprocessing and demosaic which happens when you go back to first entry of history ‘Photo loaded’ even if you didn’t change anything related to preprocessing and demosaic…
Having just started doing music production, I can say that I’ll take a physical control surface over virtual knobs and sliders any day.
I think darktable might benefit from this even more, as their sliders are tiny on my machine, and I have a terrible time grabbing them with my mouse.
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No need to grab anything there, just click into the slider. The small triangle is just an indication of the current value, it has no meaning wrt. interaction with the slider.
I’ll have to give this a try, thanks!
For basic RAW photos anyway, I have the rotary knobs set up from blacks, shadows, highlights, and whites in a row, and exposure/tint afterward. Using a knob to adjust more/less of an effect, or pushing the knob to reset it is intuitive. Recalculation speedups can be done with OpenCL assuming you have a GPU.
You can cycle between “banks” of a controller, so it’s not 1:1 for all controls.
I understand the issue regarding program effort. If the sliders can be tweaked by a plugin it’d probably take less effort than making a MIDI host. There are commercial attempts including hardware trying to sell MIDI with Lightroom in spite of MIDI2LR being superior to use, with PFixer, Palette, and iPad software like CRTL+Console, so there’s some sort of market being seen here.
If you’ve seen the way ableton live handles switching banks off effects, it is pretty good. I’d love something like that!
Implementation idea: external control would be reasonably easy to implement by others if darktable/rawtherapee had a plugin/socket/pipe/port where it was possible to list control values (display name + id), their max/default/min value, and get/set absolute value. At least for the following list: blacks, shadows, exposure, hilights, whites, white balance, tint, saturation, contrast, rotation.
The lack of such control has me consider a switch to LR.
Oh, and a reasonable step size for colour temperature is not 1 K but rather 1 Mired, giving 450 steps between 2000K and 20000K at steps of 4K on the lower end and almost 400K on the upper end with 40K step size around 6500K. This is the system used by all major brand color shift filters (and the Phillips Hue API).