You’ve come to pretty much the same conclusion as everyone who hasn’t spent enough time with darktable to know how to get what they want. Learning a new program is difficult, especially if it supposedly does the same thing as other programs but does it differently.
That’s because that’s pretty much what it is. darktable tries to leave the user pretty close to the math and give you fine grained access to turn your image.
If by “user friendly” you mean “simple” then no, darktable is not simple and it doesn’t try to be. But darktable is easy, that is, when you need something more complicated, it doesn’t take that much more effort to learn how to get there.
When you slide too far towards “simple” you get lightroom’s clarity slider. Its on slider and under the hood its doing a bunch of things. If you like part of what its doing, like local contrast, but don’t want the sharpening part of it, too bad. On the other hand, darktable has at least three different modules that have a bunch of sliders that give you control of each little part of what clarity does.
Yes that’s common. You need to understand that you don’t need to figure out every single slider of every module before you start doing some basic editing. In fact, in darktable’s current iteration, I use fewer modules than I ever had (I just use multiple instances of those modules). Really the bulk of my edits are Tone Equalizer, Color Balance RGB, Filmic. Now Color Equalizer. That’s about it.
Sure but then we loose the power that everyone enjoys.
If you need speed and can’t take the time to learn, honestly darktable probably isn’t for you. There are plenty of editors that make things fast and simple. You can eventually match editing speed and maybe be faster, but you probably won’t get there quickly.
Correct.
If you do have concrete, actionable ideas on how to improve things, then you should open a detailed feature request on github. However, this is a lot more difficult than most people assume, and while you may not understand the operational paradigms and the UI isn’t 100% consistent, things do work a certain way and you need to fit within that.
These things need to be pretty detailed, and vague statements like “I hope someone will come along and make it better”, “I feel like this could be easier”, or “this could be more intuitive” are generally not welcome, as we’ve heard them over and over again and they all mean something completely different depending on who is saying it.